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

Chasing features

[phantomfive]

I wasn't exactly sure what he meant by "Chasing Features". Because building features into your product is often a good thing, it makes your product better. After reading the article, what he meant was, "We built features the users didn't want." Which of course is a problem.

His point has nothing to do with that, really. His point was, "instead of being a mindless drone, try to figure out how to make the company better." Good advice, poorly written article.