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Joel and leaving things un-finished
By farseeker | July 2, 2008
I was going to write a bit about automatic SQL Index Selection and why I’m hating it at the moment, but the blog isn’t letting me upload media, so it’ll have to wait and you can read something else I wrote to fill in the blank space:
If any of you are not familiar with Joel on Software and you’re a programmer, or are thinking about programming, or are involved in programming, or in any way work with a programmer, you should familiarise yourself ASAP. Pretty much everything he’s ever written is gold.
My favourite article of his (find it on his site or buy his book, I’m not going to reproduce the whole thing here) regards the presentation of an un-finished product to management. The idea is that management don’t really understand how programming works (which is more true than you can ever imagine), and when you present them with an un-finished product, if the GUI is finished then they will believe and behave as if the project is finished (which is very bad for you, as a programmer). As a result, I always make sure I leave a few deliberate bugs in the GUI of anything I’m developing, right up until the product is ready to ship.
Being (mostly) internal software that I develop, and never shrink-wrapped software, this isn’t a huge deal. But what I’m also discovering is that people on the inside of the loop (i.e. other programmers) think that what I do is stupid and that I’m bringing down their standard of work. Leaving deliberate visual bugs (and my boss is included in this) is crazy talk.
My point is, don’t listen to them. Because even people ‘in the loop’ and who should know better see a finished GUI and think that the product is finished.
Topics: Principles, Programming | No Comments »