It reminded me of that quote wrongly attributed to Shigeru Miyamoto (who created Mario and Zelda and other classic games). "A rushed game is bad forever, but a delayed one may eventually be good."
Of course it may not apply to software today (except to the extent first impressions count) because modern software tends to be continuously maintained (and modern games often are too, to a much lesser degree, with post-release patches).
It applies. I did a debloated Windows 10 IoT Enterprise install for a friend (who's giving this laptop to his future wife) and iconcache in Explorer is still broken and giving me the occasional white page icon, and nt authority\system gets access denied when trying to delete %localappdata%\microsoft\windows\explorer\iconcache* while explorer is kill.
the counter quote to that is John Carmack, who was originally a fan of the "it'll ship when ready philosophy", saying he 'largely recanted from that now' when discussing Rage on the Joe Rogan podcast.
Or Duke Ellington: "I don't need time. What I need is a deadline."
Games were not updatable at the time of the quote, which makes an incredibly huge difference from products that can be regularly updated to fix issues.
I do mention that in the second paragraph. My understanding is that most [0] games don't get super-substantial updates making the game leaps and bounds better than it was in its initial state, the way continuously-developed software does. Am I wrong?
[0] Games like Minecraft, Stardew Valley, Terraria and online games being a minority.
Even if a game (or any other software) can be updated later, improving things and fixing bugs is not necessarily a business priority, because you could be adding new features or working on a new product instead.
The profit-maximizing strategy is to keep the level of crappiness that frustrates your customers, but not enough to make them switch to a competing product.
Games and software operate from a different set of first principles, games are more akin to movies in that we consume them for the experience and that final level of polish often does make or break it.
The person is adversarial, that is clear in their comment. There's literal adversarial quotes like "only do X if good for you, otherwise do the opposite". On the other hand you went straight to googling a random commenters job and attacked that.
Every one of your sentences is an assertion presented as fact. That could also be considered adversarial. GP has replied in a constructive manner in the meantime btw.
And yeah, no googling involved. I often look in HN profiles to find more context to why people are writing what they write. I don’t stalk them, tbh I find it creepy when people from HN find me on X and DM me.
I can see some of the tone being too adversarial, but I think the gist, that we are after all professional engineers, who studied and spent time and money to understand how to build such systems to high standards.
And since we are that and are paid for that knowledge, we should strive to improve software / system quality as much as possible. Isn't the job of executives, managers, etc. to figure out the constraints we have and strive to improve profit and shipping speed as much as possible?
Together, with our combined expertise we can get the practical best of all three. But if eng just nod along knowing they are sacrificing quality, security, scalability, etc. then they are doing a disservice to the team, no?
Those kinds of orgs eventually get eaten alive by orgs who had better alignment because they’re inefficient. Executives are human and they need the help of engineering teams to make some decisions. If every question about “can be ship this faster?” is answered with “no because we’re professional engineers who’ve studied a long time to build systems to high standards”, then that company will lose vs another competitor who had a more collaborative approach.
> Executives are human and they need the help of engineering teams to make some decisions. If every question about “can be ship this faster?” is answered with “no because we’re professional engineers who’ve studied a long time to build systems to high standards”, then that company will lose vs another competitor who had a more collaborative approach.
It's the executives' job to synthesize info from other orgs and understand the business. In social media apps for example, delaying a feature launch for better quality may not be worth it. In commercial aeronautics software, it matters a lot better.
You can go on all you want about which job is who's but in the end I'm still right. Those organizations who work better together will out-compete those which don't, all other things being equal. I'm sure the engineers looking for work after their employer files chapter 7 will feel smug that at least they didn't have to take responsibility for anything outside of engineering.
Sounds exhausting? Sounds like gaslighting a wee bit...
Oh nooo... the poor managers, how will they manage if you don't TRUST them blindly and completely (and bend over backwards to fulfill all their whims)? What kind of a cult is this? I'm not a sheep that needs to be herded. Besides, trust is earned.
So no, it's not exhausting, it's the exact opposite. It's refreshing and freeing.
Anyways, I get along with my coworkers very well. In fact most of my friends began as my coworkers. Then again I do not consider managers to be my coworkers. And generally speaking, yes, you could say I don't trust them. But that just comes from working in 5 for-profit companies for over 15 years. The only exception was an energy company, probably because the "just ship it" mentality wasn't as strong.
You've hit the nail on the head about trust needing to be earned. I didn't assume that this was on you or it was your fault. It just sounded like a bad situation. Also based on what you're saying manager also doesn't trust you or at the very least you don't share the same values.
That said it was quite a cynical interpretation of my comment and aggressive reply, so I'll leave it with that.
Honestly that sucks. I worked for a small-ish company before living to a FAANG, and both times in every role I had I had a great team and manager with super high trust. Makes me appreciate my experience more to read about others.
