Nobody ever paid me for code
Overall I like posts like these, as they are a reminder that you're not really paid for agonizing over eloquent or great code, but just code that "gets the job done". But then if you over-index on this viewpoint, you'll end up needing posts which remind you that this is a craft and that code needs some agonizing over.<p>What I've been pondering lately is another way to sum this up that is more future focused: Let's say a genie walks into your project and says that you can have 1.5 times the features you have right now, for 3x the code. The genie promises that the code will be "alright, maybe just kind of a bit bad". I think around 2/3 of developers would say no, but I suspect 2/3 of people in product management, sales, marketing, etc would say yes. Everyone would be sympathetic to the problems this would create, but the allure of getting 1.5X ahead on your roadmap is probably too hard to ignore for those other disciplines. It's basically accelerating all your other work streams by 1.5, at the expense of potentially bogging down dev. Obviously, countless caveats exist, but it does in general feel right, and feels like it hints at the fundamental causes of tension between business and development.