[pif]

I recommend "What Could Possibly Be Worse Than Failure?" by Alex Papadimoulis (http://thedailywtf.com/articles/What_Could_Possibly_Be_Worse...).

An excerpt: We are practically the only industry where completion and success are synonymous. If the foundation of a one-year-old home is crumbling and its roof is plagued with leaks, would anybody actually call that a success? Despite being filmed and produced on budget, is there anyone who would not be ashamed to have Gigli on their filmography? Of course not! So why are the products we create – complex information systems that should last at least fifteen years – be held to a different standard?

Now think back those projects of yours. How many would you say are maintainable by someone with less business knowledge and a weaker grasp of the system’s design? How many will not snowball into an unmaintainable mess? How many do you truly believe could last fifteen years? I’ll bet that number is quite a bit lower than all of them.

[_pmf_]

> How many would you say are maintainable by someone with less business knowledge and a weaker grasp of the system’s design? How many will not snowball into an unmaintainable mess? How many do you truly believe could last fifteen years? I’ll bet that number is quite a bit lower than all of them.

Coincidentally, the number of projects where the client offers to pay for tens of man years is also quite low. This is something I'd recommend to be taken into consideration by armchair philosophers portraying the state of the software industry.

[pif]

I've seen this worshipping of "ship soon" many times. It always ended with a buggy and messy software, an unhappy customer and a stressed development team.

[nickpsecurity]

It also turns people into millionaires and billionaires. It's how the top hardware and software companies got their market share. So, one should always assess on given project or company the First Mover & time-to-market for feature sets advantages vs quality or user perception.

[pif]

Well, the article was about "clean code", not about "most efficient for business" code :-)