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0 pointssah2ed8y ago0 comments

> If programmers paid more than lip service to responsibility, the whole dumb paradigm of "worse is better" would not exist in the first place.

I used to think like this but I've come to realize that there are two underlying tensions at play:

- How you think the world should work; - How the world really works.

It turns out that good technical people tend to dwell a lot on the first line of thinking.

Good sales/marketing types on the other hand (are trained to) dwell on the second line of thinking and they exploit this understanding to sell stuff. Their contributions in a company, in general, are easier to measure relative an engineer since revenue can be directly attributed to specific sales effort.

"Worse is better" is really just a pithy quote on how the world works and it's acceptance is crucial to building a viable business. Make of that what you will.

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kbenson8y ago

The world doesn't always work that way though. There are plenty of areas where we've decided that the cost of worse is better is unacceptable, and legislated it into only being acceptable in specific situations. For example, many engineering disciplines.

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