A long time ago, I had to think about architecture trade-offs and design decisions when building widely adopted frameworks. Surely you’d tell me that one just shouldn’t do such trade-offs, but in a corporate world that may or may not be an option.
At that time, it appeared to me that there are three types of bad design decisions (also known as work-arounds), and they mostly differ in their cost, and how that cost scales. So far, in every discussion I was told that it’s trivial. Still, it’s usually not observed.
Continue reading Three types of bad design decisions
Monthly Archives: November 2009
The importance of respect in the business of software
I found a reference to the article “Opinion: The unspoken truth about managing geeks“.
The reference is from Awasu’s “Anti-stupidity“. Thanks for drawing my attention to it!
Thanks to both your articles, I have nothing to add.
Hmmm… there’s always something to add, so how about this: The IT geniuses I’ve had the good fortune to meet all behave like that. But with IT becoming more of a profession and less of a vocation, I see first signs of IT pros turning “normal”. I don’t like it. Respect is – for all people involved – a better currency than credit.
I’ve been fiddling with the notion of trust, especially in distributed teams, for quite a while now, but respect is something that matters as much. I guess that – keeping honest respect in mind – even the quote “Unlike in many industries, the fight in most IT groups is in how to get things done, not how to avoid work. IT pros will self-organize, disrupt and subvert in the name of accomplishing work…” is not correct: I believe where mutual, honest respect is handled well, it will lead anybody to accomplishing their best and a little more. Which in turn tells us a bit about “most industries”.