How Developers Can Fight Creeping Mediocrity

Nerval's Lobster writes: As the Slashdot community well knows, chasing features has never worked out for any software company. "Once management decides that's where the company is going to live, it's pretty simple to start counting down to the moment that company will eventually die," software engineer Zachary Forrest y Salazar writes in a new posting. But how does any developer overcome the management and deadlines that drive a lot of development straight into mediocrity, if not outright ruination? He suggests a damn-the-torpedoes approach: "It's taking the code into your own hands, building or applying tools to help you ship faster, and prototyping ideas," whether or not you really have the internal support. But given the management issues and bureaucracy confronting many companies, is this approach feasible?

Comments

Software engineer fails to understand business

[Anonymous Coward]

No shit, the company's going to die because an insane brogrammer asshole decides the codebase needs to cater to the whims of the twentysomethings who read about something neat on the internet. Then he burns through the development budget rewriting the code to fit the new paradigm while simultaneously failing to provide the deliverables.

Re:Software engineer fails to understand business

[jellomizer]

If programmers are left to their own devices, no code will ever get released, because complex systems have too many variables to test, take a long time to code, by the time you get to the end you realized you could have done the beginning better.
There are so many times I go back to my old code and say to myself what was I thinking? There is a much easier way to do this.

Sometimes it is cheaper to leave the bloat and use more hardware to compensate.

I have a lot of half done apps in production. There are thing I want to do to make them better, however I probably won't get to them by EOL because the customer is generally happy with it, and I have other higher priority projects in my queue.