from Hacker News

The Ikea Effect in Software

by khasan222 on 6/25/17, 7:14 PM with 10 comments

  • by tritium on 6/25/17, 8:37 PM

    Man, it is so not about the IKEA effect.

    This isn't about some puppy-dog infatuation with a spice rack or a bird house. It's about having your fucking time wasted, when you could have been out doing pretty much anything except coaxing some shitty interpreter to JIT compile a blob into some blinky lights for a herd of indecisive squawking ostrichs, amid their kangaroo court pecking order.

    Hours of my life gone. And for what? A clicky-doo button at a company that might not exist in 10 years?

  • by wtracy on 6/25/17, 8:53 PM

    Not only does being around objective machines all day long not make us more objective, I think it has the opposite effect.

    Specifically, programmers like to perceive themselves as being objective and logical. This opens a giant blind spot toward the biases that we do have. The resulting cognitive dissonance allows all kinds of irrational beliefs to fester.

    I used to think that the most wonderful thing about working in engineering was that engineering organizations are meritocracies. Then I realized that a organization that genuinely believes itself to be a meritocracy while being rife with nepotism is actually much worse than an organization where cronyism happens out in the open!

  • by mattgreenrocks on 6/25/17, 8:25 PM

    I'd hoped the author would talk more about how cobbling an app together from 30 different npm packages is a wholly different experience from using only a few and designing the code to model the problem being solved, rather than being forced into a solution by your dependencies. The distinction is subtle but real. I submit that great software must be designed.

  • by bambax on 6/25/17, 7:58 PM

    The antidote to that is to think about code as a draft. All code is a draft, one attempt among many, to solve a problem. A draft is a step to the future. A prototype of sorts.

  • by theparanoid on 6/25/17, 7:49 PM

    Code is a liability. A light bulb went off when I first heard that.

  • by empath75 on 6/25/17, 9:10 PM

    I thought this would be about consumer software that forces the end user to 'assemble' it someway, which would have been a super interesting essay.