“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...
>
Exactly.
I read a book, where one of the characters is a smith. It has this exchange, between him, and another character:
"Always do the very best job you can," he said on another occasion as he put a last few finishing touches with a file on the metal parts of a wagon tongue he was repairing.
"But that piece goes underneath," Garion said. "No one will ever see it."
"But I know it's there," Durnik said, still smoothing the metal. "If it isn't done as well as I can do it, I'll be ashamed every time I see this wagon go by -and I'll see the wagon every day.”
What kind of runner can run as fast as they possibly can from the very start of a race?
[Audience reply: Sprinter]
Right, only somebody who runs really short races, okay?
[Audience laughter]
But of course, we are programmers, and we are smarter than runners, apparently, because we know how to fix that problem, right? We just fire the starting pistol every hundred yards and call it a new sprint.
https://github.com/matthiasn/talk-transcripts/blob/master/Hi...
If you've never watched Simple Made Easy I really recommend it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LKtk3HCgTa8
> [Audience reply: Sprinter]
> Right, only somebody who runs really short races, okay?
> [Audience laughter]
> But of course, we are programmers, and we are smarter than runners, apparently, because we know how to fix that problem, right? We just fire the starting pistol every hundred yards and call it a new sprint.
https://github.com/matthiasn/talk-transcripts/blob/master/Hi...
> In a way I would have loved to ship with that hack in there, but once we found the cause of the error message I couldn't in good conscience leave the hack in there. Besides which hand editing it added time to completing the build, which was inefficient.
Source: https://www.wcnews.com/news/2023/09/18/mythbusters-wing-comm...
The link is about investigating the origin of the “thank you for playing wing commander” error message, which seems fitting too.
The metaphor of interest was the whole reason that Ward Cunningham initially coined the term "tech debt":
"Technical Debt is a metaphor, coined by Ward Cunningham, that frames how to think about dealing with this cruft, thinking of it like a financial debt. The extra effort that it takes to add new features is the interest paid on the debt."
While Apple is certainly not on the same level as that, the point is true craftsmanship and meticulous attention to detail does still exist in consumer goods, and can be handsomely profitable.