(This is a snapshot of my old weblog. New posts and selected republished essays can be found at raganwald.com.)
Friday, February 22, 2008
The house that Mike built
I’ll tell you, as a contractor, I’m sick of fixing crap. There’s nothing better than building it right the first time. Repairing bad work is full of compromises—you’re dealing with existing structure, with existing mistakes, with other peoples’ choices of inferior materials and bad designs. It’s always more work, and it costs more, to go back and fix what was done wrong in the first place.
—Mike Holmes, The house that Mike built
Comments on “The house that Mike built”:
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I love that quote. I could stick it on my website and people would think it's about maintenance programming, not fixing a bad construction job. Does that make "Do it right the first time" some kind of universal truth? :-)
There are some interesting parallels between building physical things like houses and building software.
What appeals to us, as craftspeople in both construction and programming, is sometimes at odds with our employers' needs.
For example, the faster a real estate developer can get a building constructed, the faster he will see some return on his investment. This is even more important in a time where a real estate bubble bursting appears imminent. So you can imagine the pressure to (sometimes literally) cut corners.
A small real life example from my recently built house: the molding around a bathroom door was wide enough that it would have overlapped with a switch plate. The solution: cut out a notch in the molding.
When I, as a software developer, make similar choices in the heat of the moment, I die a little inside.
What appeals to us, as craftspeople in both construction and programming, is sometimes at odds with our employers' needs.
For example, the faster a real estate developer can get a building constructed, the faster he will see some return on his investment. This is even more important in a time where a real estate bubble bursting appears imminent. So you can imagine the pressure to (sometimes literally) cut corners.
A small real life example from my recently built house: the molding around a bathroom door was wide enough that it would have overlapped with a switch plate. The solution: cut out a notch in the molding.
When I, as a software developer, make similar choices in the heat of the moment, I die a little inside.
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