“When you’re a carpenter making a beautiful chest of drawers, you’re not going to use a piece of plywood on the back, even though it faces the wall and nobody will ever see it. You’ll know it’s there, so you’re going to use a beautiful piece of wood on the back. For you to sleep well at night, the aesthetic, the quality, has to be carried all the way through.”
I think software as a whole suffers greatly from this "well, I got it barely done, technically fulfilling the requirements, so my work is over" attitude.
1: https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/445621-when-you-re-a-carpen...
Software - or at least, the kind of software I have worked on in my career - is never finished. It is a neverending ship of theseus.
I can muster motivation to try really hard on something that has an end point. But the idea of maintaining that kind of motivation and focus on a project that just goes on and on and on is, for me, near-unimaginable. You could pay me a million dollars a year and I think I would still really struggle with it. It's something I think about a lot and struggle with, because I have certainly had colleagues who seem to be able to maintain that level of craft on software projects.
> Software - or at least, the kind of software I have worked on in my career - is never finished. It is a neverending ship of theseus.
Totally agree. I've done several rants on HN about the software industry's inability to declare their products "done" and moving on. Every product that we complain about becoming "enshittified" should have been declared "done" and developers pencils-down years ago.