[josephg]

Facebook flew me over from Australia to interview a decade or so ago, back when they seemed untouchable as a product. I told one of my housemates that I was interviewing with them and she fired up, angrily telling me that I needed to go over there and tell them to stop changing things. Her experience of using Facebook was basically that she’d just figure out where the button for something was, and then they would redesign it for seemingly no reason and she couldn’t find anything again. I asked her a bunch of questions (since this is great stuff to talk about in interviews). I hadn’t appreciated how upsetting redesigns are to people who just want to use the software.

But you also need to make your software good for you as a programmer too. As programmers we’re like builders. What we build today becomes our workspace tomorrow. Leaving a codebase neat and tidy makes it easier to spot bugs and make changes down the road. You can overdo it, but spending 20 minutes adding unit tests today could save you a week of debugging 6 months down the line.