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Comment by cogman10 | Hacker News Reader

> In reality, the post-go-live support can take a surprising amount of time, but is rarely accounted for.

Really the most frustrating part of PM. I have never had a PM that understood "we could implement features faster if we took a little time to go back and tighten up the code". Instead it's just a constant stream of one feature after the next with whatever got written down the first time by a fresh college grad being the golden solution.

It's particularly frustrating because PM tend to measure success by the number of features produced. That alone incentivizes a fair number of devs to just pump out shit without thinking about what they are producing.

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It's like running a marathon and you keep falling on your face because your shoes are untied, but you "don't have time" to stop and tie them, so instead you just keep tripping over and over and over while your competition recedes into the distance.

Bonk.

In the limit, you reach the level of that joke I remember hearing as a kid (and I think it dates to post-WWII rebuilding / soviet era). One possible retelling:

An outside inspection comes to a busy construction site. As they watch the workers running with wheelbarrows, back and forth between material storage and active construction, they notice that all the wheelbarrows are empty. They flag a foreman, and ask him, "why are all these workers pushing empty wheelbarrows around?", to which the foreman replies, "we're so swamped with work, there's no time to load them!".

Also heared the story in my childhood. The reason they are keep doing that is that the loader guy is missing and they are not going to be paid unless a reward from some work.

From my experience, it's the business pressuring the PM into situations like this. If PMs want to keep their jobs, they're often just as helpless as the devs having to execute the work.

Sounds like Xtreme Go Horse Methodology. It is the fastest and therefore best. https://github.com/Brunomachadob/xgh

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