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
Seeing a lot of people missing the point in response to this. Jobs' comment here makes me think of the Lord of the Rings appendices that came out when the trilogy was first released on DVD. The behind scenes on the set building showed their artists had carved all of these intricate detailed horses onto parts of the furniture in Edoras that would never show on screen, even knowing they would never show on screen.

Lord of the Rings didn't fail to ship or lose money because of this. They made money, but more than that, they created something that will be remembered forever for quality and craftsmanship. Not every carpenter has to care that much and the same is certainly true of people shipping computing equipment. Just like Peter Jackson, Steve Jobs got rich, but he won't be remembered for being rich. He's remembered for quality and craftsmanship. I can't sit here and say everyone who builds anything should build for maximum quality, but I have trouble believing we'd be worse off as a world if we had more Notre Dames and Parthenons and fewer pothole-riddled main streets with falling apart boarded up storefronts.