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by mdoms 1807 days ago
> This is just a really silly way to think of craftsmanship. Whoever you pay to redo your bathroom doesn't care at all, literally at all, about your motivations behind wanting to redo your bathroom and how you think it'll change your whole morning and evening routines.

This depends on who you hire. I recently built a home and dealt with lots of different contractors with different attitudes. Very often when they needed clarification they would come to me, and very often I would ask them "what would you do if it were your home?".

I worked with companies and workers who I would hire again in a heartbeat - they understood what I wanted from my home and how it would be used. They incorporated this into designs and decisions made on site (because I don't care how well you think you've planned, there are ALWAYS decisions to make one site).

The people I would never work with again were the ones who either never even asked for clarification and simply chose the easiest / cheapest solution to a problem (often surprising me - in a bad way) or when I asked them what they would do in their own home were not interested in engaging with that question - they would respond by asking me again what I wanted.

You may not care if your current employer considers you a bad hire or not, and that's fine. In our industry, in this market, you can get away with that. Some of us hold ourselves to a higher standard.

2 comments

I remember hearing a story from a structural engineer who was disappointed with a builder on a commercial site. He took him around the site and showed him some of the sub-standard work and said to him, "This is not your best work, is it?" The builder responded with, "You should have told me you wanted my best."

I've seen this in software too. People push for cheaper and faster, but often that will only come at the cost of quality. There are good reasons to take on technical debt. For example, to get to market without the funds to avoid technical debt, in the hope you can pay down that debt with revenue flowing in. But there are seldom conversations with business people to negotiate on the quality, time, and cost trade-offs.

> You may not care if your current employer considers you a bad hire or not, and that's fine. In our industry, in this market, you can get away with that. Some of us hold ourselves to a higher standard.

This is just silly. Your argument is that you would care if your employer developed ridiculous and contrived metrics and then assessed your value based on them? I don't really think your holier-than-thou statement makes much sense in that capacity.

As I said, equity drives investment. If you don't own a percentage of the success, you're trading time for money. This is neither new nor controversial. Any suggestions otherwise are, again, hustle culture propaganda.

It's like you skipped over my entire post and only read the last sentence.

> Your argument is that you would care if your employer developed ridiculous and contrived metrics and then assessed your value based on them?

No. As I alluded to, I think that a developer who does not care about his or her end user is a worse developer in concrete ways.

> No. As I alluded to, I think that a developer who does not care about his or her end user is a worse developer in concrete ways.

Remove developer and answer again.

"I think that a who does not care about his or her end user is a worse in concrete ways"

??

> "I think that a who does not care about his or her end user is a worse in concrete ways"

You're just....saying things...? What does "Caring about the end user" have to do with "Believing in your product"?

You told them to remove "developer" from their sentence and they did, that's how the sentence now reads. I didn't get your point either above.
Dare to care. It may surprise you. If you take mercantile view of the world then that’s how the world will treat you.
More nonsense. I care hard about things that care about me, aka not businesses that I do not have a stake in.
Then ask for a stake? This is why so many people are paid part of their salary in stock options.
Yep, I do. But lots of employers don't offer any form of equity as compensation. The same employers that demand their employees to be "invested" in the company.