“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...
You just got it barely working? Great, now make it beautiful while you have the context. It’s done when it is tight, fielded, and you can forget about it.
On tech “culture”: My worst-rated comment on HN was when I suggested devs should spend 15m less on Twitter/HN and put them toward writing more unit tests so they’d understand and enjoy their work more.
To me, that sums up where we are now.
Because everybody knows that spending 15m less on HN will not give you better anything. It's like saying "working more hours a day you will have more code". It just leads to burn-out. Most programmers need some idle time between thinking. Or like saying "Want to have house? Eat less avocado toast and skip that starbucks coffee."