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
I appreciate this analogy, but Jobs made this work by creating a leadership culture that was obsessed with quality and craftsmanship. By all accounts he would regularly refuse to ship hardware and software that wasn't up to his standards and fired people for not building things to the right specifications. In contrast, most of us work in organizations with the exact opposite leadership mentality, namely "get your work done as quickly as possible so we can sell more product, and fudge whatever you have to to make it through quality testing unscathed".

>>quacke+Z4
> In contrast, most of us work in organizations with the exact opposite leadership mentality, namely "get your work done as quickly as possible so we can sell more product, and fudge whatever you have to to make it through quality testing unscathed".

When I was in leadership and advocated for getting things done as quickly as possible, the principle reason is that it didn't matter: the company already failed by the time I had subordinates. My reward was that I got 4 extra years of my life back by leaving 1 year in rather than at the bitter end, compared to my colleagues.

It's my opinion that most companies are 90% operating failures / doing stuff that doesn't make sense, while there is 10% that does make sense and subsidizes all the failure. Some people call this taking risks, and indeed the worst places to work take the fewest risks, but I don't think the two are related.

Also the Lisa was a disaster. I don't think there is generalized advice here, even if you have all the conditions where craftsmanship and aesthetics are literally the #1 values your product has.

>>doctor+l11
>It's my opinion that most companies are 90% operating failures / doing stuff that doesn't make sense, while there is 10% that does make sense and subsidizes all the failure. Some people call this taking risks, and indeed the worst places to work take the fewest risks, but I don't think the two are related.

so, is the metaphor of drawer useless in software? Is there no point taking pride in the craft because it's all going to fail anyway?

I don't mean this rhetorically. I just genuinely wonder what and how different people's mindsets are with respect to work in the field. I work in games so success is rarely guaranteed, and shorcuts often taken. There's very few times I can say that better code would have saved a game financially.