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Avoiding Mistakes Can Be a Huge Mistake

Posted by ScuttleMonkey on from the joys-of-corporate-overlordship dept.

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?"

2 of 268 comments (clear)

  1. Dear Paul, by sootman · · Score: 1, Offtopic

    I respect what you've done. Creating
    what became the Yahoo! store in Lisp
    was pretty cool. "A Plan For Spam"
    was awesome. (Too bad Microsoft
    gave spammers infinite resources
    with which to create infinite variations
    of messages and defeat Bayesian filtering.)

    But please... it's almost 2009. I don't care
    what you once read about optimal column
    width. Why not just let the text be a fraction
    of the page's width and let the reader decide
    how wide they want it to be? I've got a GUI
    and resizable windows and a wide monitor
    and everything.

    Thanks,
    - The Internet

    --
    Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
  2. Shit! by Migity · · Score: 0, Offtopic

    I fucked up this post!