| So… Many developers never get past a composition first mindset. That is beginner shit. It’s putting legos together without the instruction manual only to stress about how the pieces click together instead what the final state is. You end up with lots of decoration and shit everywhere. In the military we call this not seeing the forest for the trees. As a senior myself in the corporate world who enjoys writing open source software there is a world of difference between people build products and people that just write code at work. It’s a difference in velocity, planning, and volume. When you are writing software on your own where you aren’t paid for your time you tend to be in far less of a hurry and yet produce 10x as much. As a corporate developer you are paid to hurry and complete tasks and in many cases with incomplete documentation, which is just writing code and sometimes guessing at what you need. When you are on your own success is measured in product delivery and feature completion, which is not just writing code. Another major difference is communication. If you communicate poorly your open source software is dead on arrival. End of story. You should never have to guess at your business requirements, APIs, steps to reproduce defects, and various other things. The more you have to guess the more mistakes you will make. The only path to redemption is to communicate more precisely than those around you. Perhaps the worst distinction is design by committee. Frequent long meetings just waste peoples time. The time that’s left over means hurry harder. A more productive direction is for some fool to sit a position of leadership and make arbitrary decisions. A wrong decision can be fixed, but wasted time is gone forever. You can’t really explain this to a developer who has never written code outside the office because they refuse to believe what they have never experienced. The hurried low productivity churn is all they know. |
so true!