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
The culture hasn't persisted. Take a look at the output of the console app on your Mac: They are using the software equivalent of plywood in Mac OS nowadays.

>>speled+G41
How could it persist? Companies optimize for profit, quality be damned. In contrast, craftsmen take pride in their work, and pride is what creates quality.

>>kibwen+Z61
Fun fact, there's a word in Greek for "pride in your work": Meraki.

>>stavro+sc1
Meraki also means "done with love", which gives it a slightly different spin than just pride. You're proud of it because it comes from the heart!