zlacker

>>todsac+(OP)
Not a huge Steve Jobs fanboy, but I always liked his quote[1] about craftsmanship, sweating the details, and giving a fuck:

“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...

>>ryandr+n4
Strongly object to the assessment that developers have this half checked-out mindset. Now, of course, this would differ from workplace to workplace, so YMMV, but at my workplace, so many developers have the craftsmanship attitude. They'd love to solve hard problems and solve them well, not because the solutions are worth money in a marketplace, but because they are intrinsically valuable, interesting, meaningful, delightful, etc. to the developers.

The problem is the business doesn't care about anything except how much money can be gotten out it, often with a short-term horizon.

So the developers and the business people walk shoulder to shoulder for a little ways, where the two interests are aligned, but then we part ways at the point of introducing technical debt. As a developer, I'm not free to take the time I need to pay down this debt, because of business constraints.

>>cvoss+c7
You'll notice I never blamed developers in particular. This attitude is shared across "software as a whole" including developers, their managers, their PMs, their exec leadership. Everyone is part of the machine that is prioritizing money and a short-term horizon over craftsmanship and quality, including but not limited to the developers. We all have agency.