| Thanks for sharing your thoughts here. I think it's useful for us to get a glimpse into your thought process and start a discussion. Though I empathize with the overall desire, you sound inexperienced to me, as in, you might have had some failures that you attributed to lack of planning or business decisions, etc, but you haven't learnt from successes, because some of the stuff you're saying is just extreme counterproductive wishful thinking to the point where it sounds like trolling. For example, 'building cool rock-solid code' is typically not a business goal or at best, a nice to have. Developers are hired to solve a business problem. If the code doesn't solve the problem, you're wasting precious resources. 'cool code' is a personal choice. Compromising is essentially a trade-off like any other, and it requires careful deliberation in every context. Your opting to not compromise by default means that you're introducing friction in the team, in the business relationship and potentially affecting the life of the business, not to mention that it's a 'us vs them' mentality when you're supposed to be part of a team to deliver a product together. Your reasoning about hasty decisions biting you is also backwards. Notice how you're just assuming that a product will start getting enough users to need to scale. Guess what: like most products, the product you worked on was actually not that great, didn't have a good product-market fit and if you hadn't spent all that time polishing and planning the cool non-junior code, you might have saved everyone months of time. Also you go from 'never skip planning' to 'take as long as you need'. Those are 2 extreme approaches. It turns out that a little planning goes a long way. You can come back and iterate on the plan. No plan is going to be perfect from the start, because you don't have all of the information available to you when you start a project. As you develop a project, you get more information on hidden requirements, user expectations, non-functional requirements and various other metrics that you couldn't have thought about ahead of time. What you are describing is the waterfall approach to software development and the only way it doesn't fail is if the domain and the product are very well understood (e.g. "build a grep clone in Rust"), but most products aren't well understood ahead of time, only in retrospect, so it's a constant back-and-forth between acquiring new understandings about the product and applying them in practice by changing what's already there. It requires your code to be flexible, not 'cool' or 'rock solid'. Consequently, you will never get 100% visibility into what you are building. If you find yourself thinking "gee I know exactly what we are building" you are setting yourself up for disappointment when 'the business people' pull the rug under all your diagrams and schemas and types that you spent months designing instead of getting a usable POC out the door asap. Honestly, it's just a phase you're going through. Once you get burned by your current approach a few times, you'll internalize the need to avoid either extremes and you'll start looking for that middle ground with each project. I know it because I went through the same phase in my career. Good luck! |
The only reason why this becomes a phase that burns developers out is that writing high quality software is hard, under-appreciated and needs to be painstakingly learned by experience and guidance by experienced mentors. But most projects in the industry are complete shitheaps where the seniors need to spend all their time fighting fires instead of teaching the craft to juniors. No wonder developers get burned out.