Avoiding Mistakes Can Be a Huge Mistake

theodp writes "No doubt many will nod knowingly as they read Paul Graham's The Other Half of 'Artists Ship', which delves into the downside of procedures developed by Big Companies to protect themselves against mistakes. Because every check you put on your programmers has a cost, Graham warns: 'And just as the greatest danger of being hard to sell to is not that you overpay but that the best suppliers won't even sell to you, the greatest danger of applying too many checks to your programmers is not that you'll make them unproductive, but that good programmers won't even want to work for you.' Sound familiar, anyone?"

Comments

More checks!

[I.M.O.G.]

From the article:

Whenever someone in an organization proposes to add a new check, they should have to explain not just the benefit but the cost. No matter how bad a job they did of analyzing it, this meta-check would at least remind everyone there had to be a cost, and send them looking for it.

So bureaucracy has a cost in that it places lots of checks on things, and the solution to that is adding more checks?

Sounds like solid bureaucracy to me!

Re:Perhaps

[Anonymous Coward]

Code reviews teach the reviewers as much as they check on the author. Why would you deny the lesser programmers the joy and experience of looking at good code?