I actually wrote something on this back in February. The TL;DR being that given that so many companies manage to build impressive businesses on garbage software, that maybe professional devs like myself were thinking about it all wrong. Maybe garbage is “good enough”.
It wasn’t until months later that I posed this question to a former project manager and he offered the best explanation I’ve heard so far. Garbage is indeed good enough… until it isn’t. Then you’ve got to spend 10 times more money to unfuck the mess. So either you pay a little more now, or a lot more later. Either way, building it properly has a higher return in the end.
Well said. It’s also related to why people have the old saying: you should buy proper boots and spend some money on them. Also related to Sam Vimes theory of socioeconomic unfairness.
And it’s tricky to get it right. A cheap job is often the more expensive one and vice versa. Also in programming.
I recently saw some Youtube video from someone who said he was an artist, doing video work, advertisements etc. And he loves his job and doing a good job. And he can’t earn money with that any more, since someone else will do it on his iPhone, do the post-processing in two hours on some modern video editor and chage a tenth of the price (or so). So there isn’t a big market for a freelancer with a $10,000 camera spending lots of hours on color-grading and getting details perfect…
I mean I totally get that. In the old days this wasn’t a thing. Now it is and you don’t need quality, you need some Insta reel twice a week for your company to stay relevant and quality doesn’t matter with those. I feel this itself isn’t the problem. But it’s going to become a big issue once there aren’t many experts, professionals and artists left. Because occasionally people need something robust or nice and with substance to it.
I actually wrote something on this back in February. The TL;DR being that given that so many companies manage to build impressive businesses on garbage software, that maybe professional devs like myself were thinking about it all wrong. Maybe garbage is “good enough”.
It wasn’t until months later that I posed this question to a former project manager and he offered the best explanation I’ve heard so far. Garbage is indeed good enough… until it isn’t. Then you’ve got to spend 10 times more money to unfuck the mess. So either you pay a little more now, or a lot more later. Either way, building it properly has a higher return in the end.
Well said. It’s also related to why people have the old saying: you should buy proper boots and spend some money on them. Also related to Sam Vimes theory of socioeconomic unfairness.
And it’s tricky to get it right. A cheap job is often the more expensive one and vice versa. Also in programming.
I recently saw some Youtube video from someone who said he was an artist, doing video work, advertisements etc. And he loves his job and doing a good job. And he can’t earn money with that any more, since someone else will do it on his iPhone, do the post-processing in two hours on some modern video editor and chage a tenth of the price (or so). So there isn’t a big market for a freelancer with a $10,000 camera spending lots of hours on color-grading and getting details perfect…
I mean I totally get that. In the old days this wasn’t a thing. Now it is and you don’t need quality, you need some Insta reel twice a week for your company to stay relevant and quality doesn’t matter with those. I feel this itself isn’t the problem. But it’s going to become a big issue once there aren’t many experts, professionals and artists left. Because occasionally people need something robust or nice and with substance to it.