Asshole Driven Development | Hacker News Reader

Asshole Driven Development

scottberkun.com

102 pointssidcool25 comments

There seems to have been an influx of these sort of posts on HN recently.

To be honest, engineers are just people. A wide sample of folks from different backgrounds, cultures, ethnicities, educational-backgrounds, etc etc.

This wildcard lumping of people into various categories has got to stop. It's ridiculous to say the least, and really does the profession harm when you separate the engineer from the individual in question.

People are different.

Posted on June 19th, <2007> in Management, Software/Web development

-- Whats was old, is now again New

That's probably worth emphasizing more: this post is pretty old.

And that it is still relevant suggests some truisms lay within it.

I find it interesting that; "He worked at Microsoft from 1994 to 2003, mostly on Internet Explorer 1.0 to 5.0 (not 6)" ...

That sure makes it sound like IE6 was a pariah project. It's the sort of thing that makes people go out of their way to say "I had no part in the making of that monster".

Hmm. More Bozo Loop material.

Pariah project? People forget IE6 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IE6 was released in 2000 freaking one, for Christ's sake. It was state of the art for years. Sure it started becoming a pain in the ass to developers years later, but it's only a pariah project with the benefit of 20/20 hindsight and years of continued engineering development.

Maybe Opera could have been considered state of the art - but I agree. IE6 was a great browser. It was the delay for IE7 that was the problem.

Yeah, but it became SUCH a pain in the ass later on that it's entirely understandable that people would later on not want to be associated with it.

The article missed CADT: http://www.jwz.org/doc/cadt.html

never time to do it right, always time to do it over.

That's a great article, thanks!

"...and the new maintainer can't be bothered to check whether his new version has actually solved any of the known problems that existed in the previous version"

It's even worse than that:

- The new version might have new bugs that the old version didn't have.

- The new version might not have all the features you've come to depend on in the old version.

- The new version might have APIs or syntax that are not compatible with the old version.

I like to say "Rewrote it? So now its bigger, slower and more expensive!"

Great read!

"It hardly seems worth even having a bug system if the frequency of from-scratch rewrites always outstrips the pace of bug fixing."

An argument for how GNOME developers can avoid this problem was recently made at http://jeff.ecchi.ca/blog/2012/10/08/reducing-our-core-apps-...

There should be a name for these types of articles: Pigeonhole Driven Discussion.

Where is Know-it-All Driven Development? Oh wait.

You just need to find another job. Those don't sound like forms of development, just unprofessional people making bad decisions. Good luck.

CYAE has been a dominant force in government for years now.

We implement ADD, CDD, CYAE extensively in our company ..

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