“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...
It's a feature, not a bug; the chest of drawers is heavy enough already and someone's gonna have to move it someday. Making the back as thin as possible is doing a kindness to a future owner when they have to relocate the damn thing.
Yeah, that's the point. Do you want to be one of the millions of craftspeople who doesn't sweat the details? Or do you want to be exceptional?
... definitely a lesson I think many software engineers should internalize.
sure, no other reason than "less stability". You may or may not need the stability, but sacrificing it so that is 2% easier to carry into a house (which happens maybe, once per 2 years for an especially nomadic person) seems to be the exact kinds of corners management likes to take.