[Hasu]

Yes, that's the point of the quote, but the point of the poster you're replying to is that wasting half your budget would be considered gross incompetence in any other department.

"Half the lines of code I write are useless, I just don't know which half." - an incompetent coder

"Half the time I spend on the phone is wasted, I just don't know which half" - an incompetent salesperson

"Half of my menu is inedible, I just don't know which half" - an incompetent restauranteur

[tpmoney]

I don't know, you see plenty of people stating they only do X hours of real work in a given day. That sounds an awful lot like the same basic idea.

If I think about it too, half the lines of code being wasted is probably a relatively reasonable measure for writing code. Not because they're actually literally useless, but because you write a lot of scaffolding, a lot of first passes and a lot of code that will be a dead end or superseded before you're done. If you knew before you started exactly what lines of code you'd need to write, you'd be much more efficient, but we don't, so we write a lot of "waste" code too.

[johnnyanmac]

> "Half the lines of code I write are useless, I just don't know which half." - an incompetent coder

Legacy code in a nutshell. On some blue moon you get a chance to do a clean refsctor, but otherwise business doesn't care if 90% of the code is useless.

Even as the refactorer, you know that refactoring can be anywhere from throwing away simple unused code, to removing a seeming unneeded line and causing a forest fire. I imagine that's the equivalent with advertising (i.e I agree with you).

[chrisjj]

> the point of the poster you're replying to is that wasting half your budget would be considered gross incompetence in any other department.

Not if there too a spend of X was required to get the value of X/2.