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by ebiester 2387 days ago
I'd say the word you're looking for is Software Crafts[man,woman] but I don't necessarily believe the two are exclusive, but rather horizontal and vertical axes.

There is a difference between someone actively making compromises between time to market and features, and someone who doesn't understand how to write software in a maintainable fashion but can get something quickly out to market. There are even people who are good at neither.

2 comments

This is an understated point, there is a difference between intended technical debt and incompetence.

At a very micro level, yesterday I was looking at a simple JS object with 6 entries, and 3 different naming conventions. Doing even simple changes without code-completion in the code base is mentally taxing.

Very much agreed. In fact, I'd say that "building the right thing" often enables "building the thing right": by not spending time building things that are unimportant, you can spend time making the things that are work better.

Needing to get to market faster doesn't mean skimping on, say, a proper CI setup; it means not trying to do everything, and focusing on delivering and iterating on only those features that are relevant to the market.