On Plumbers

Picture this situation: you woke up this morning to find that there’s no water coming through your valves and taps. No sink water. No shower water. Having no plumbing experience, you call around for a plumber.

Plumber #1

Plumber #1, let’s call him Mario, tells you he can’t be bothered to come check out your issue because it’s minor and he’s very important and too busy for it. You explain that you really need a plumber, and he explains he’ll do it for 1.5x what everybody else costs, and only if you have lunch and coffee ready for him when he arrives. You have no water, keep in mind, so making coffee is an extra special effort.

Intro

Almost exactly 1 month ago today I found myself on a video call with Joel Spolsky. It feels insane to write that, even now, as it was a banner moment in my career. For me it was the equivalent of meeting a movie star who I had idolized since I was old enough to know what movies were. There had always been this Joel Spolsky guy throughout my career that I regularly read about and whose opinions on software development agreed with mine, and suddenly I was talking with him face to face. It was awesome.

The Problem

I think that most devs would agree when I state that the definition of success in the corporate world of development places less emphasis on “good” code and more emphasis on “working” code. Working code is code that can be released to production on or before the deadline, regardless of performance or even bugs in most cases. As a developer, you ultimately feel as if you’ve failed when you toil for nights on end to meet steep deadlines and churn out crappy code. As a business, however, you’ve succeeded when you hit the deadline. My experience tells me that the typical metric upon which development teams are measured is often not quality of code or unit tests or even performance, but instead ability to meet deadlines and deliver solutions to clients. You’ve failed when you do not meet the deadlines and thus piss off the clients/customers. Your job has become a veritable boolean result with the outcomes of true and false. Deadline met? True. Deadline missed? False.