And moved the burden of maintenance to someone else? If so, this is one of the things people are complaining about 10x dev on twitter. You may look good, but the team / dept / company is worse off, and someone else has to clean up.
I agree design by committee can produce awful results - and I said nothing about a single person doing a design as being an issue.
My last project I released still had about 20 TODOs in the code. I launched it, it got great reviews, everyone loved it, then I got a new project and they deprioritized the "cleanup" phase. I suspect the edge-cases are just getting handled manually - no one cares and I'm still a hero.
The people/team handling it manually probably care
The alternative to shipping something that works good enough, on time often isn’t to ship something perfect on time but to not ship on time or even worse, -at all.
That would be even worse for the people/team supposed to use the product.
Please justify that.
I did some software, a not too complex chunk of work for a midlands (UK) retailer in 1999. It dealt with a couple of million pounds of retail orders that year. Not so big but not trivial either. It was still in use in 2015, and quite possibly is today (although the boss told me they re-used it for a rather different purpose by their sales reps).
It was very reliable because I fought to keep it simple, and tested it brutally (eg. the core part took 5 days to write but got 3 weeks testing, founding only 2 errors, but it was 2 errors fewer).
If it was crap it would have been junked so I'll claim that the end quality contributes to its life.
High reliability tends to stick around. I think lex/yacc started in the 70s and is still around today in the form of its spiritual successors flex/bison. Ancient but still grinding along.
' In a 2008 interview, Johnson reflected that "the contribution Yacc made to the spread of Unix and C is what I'm proudest of" ' (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yacc)
If you ship crap its lifetime is intrinsically much shortened. That's my thesis anyway.
Not everything needs 90% test coverage and more comments than code to be good. And not everything with 90% test coverage and more comments than code is any good at all.
BUT - when someone else new comes along to look at it, the 90% code coverage, and comments helps them immensely - they can get up to speed to fix whatever bug has appeared a lot quicker.
Code that doesn't do the job is worthless, no matter how testable and well-designed it is.
Of course you can debate whether this is a management (scheduling, resource, PM) problem or a developer (competence, architecture, tool choice) problem - most likely some of both.
But whoever is responsible, it's still a non-solution.
The real world is much sloppier than any book will ever tell you.
> is about the development cost vs maintenance cost
Absolutely true.
> how the latter beats the former
If you're believing that equivocally ((I don't think you personally are btw) then I don't think you're reading the advice the book is giving you correctly.
A shitty technical solution that gets to market quicker often (not always) can make the company more money in the long run. There is no "one right answer" here, it's all about judgement. 100+ tech DD's and counting...I've seen the whole spectrum. I've seen a $40M revenue (38% EBITDA) tech company built using a FileMaker-like tech stack (all WYSIWYG). And yes, I'm serious.
Sometimes the burden of maintenance is the price you have to pay go get an operational/production system early on and enables you to let other requirements emerge earlier.
You might focus on the "burden of maintenance", and also assume that you're saving time by taking the long route to production, but letting requirements emerge early on in the project is also a significant time saver as it enables the project to avoid committing the mistake of investing time developing a goldplated solution that will have to be thrown out.
You need to accept the fact that the "burden of maintenance" is always there and it will always be there, whether you invest years rolling your goldplated solution or just dash to production with a quick and dirty solution. You don't get rid of that burden by aiming for an academically pristine implementation that takes ages to deliver. Requirements do change, and do so continuously. Heck, designing stuff for a scale that will never be required is also a major problem. So, why would anyone be concerned with having to spend 120% of the time developing a solution if that path enables you to get up and running in 20% of the time?
If you read on:
> > One day, I said "this needs to go", and everybody listened, architects and directors alike.
The OP hacked a shitty solution to make people listen to him. Once people started listening to him, he found it easier to persuade them to let him improve things.
Now, if they hadn't gotten the credibility (due to the short term fix for thing they wrote broke sooner than expected), or they gained a lot more credibility and moved in the company, or out of it, the broken thing would still be there, and someone would have inherited it, and had to refactor / relearn / replace it.
One of the points about 10x devs that people are pushing back on is this - do the thing to a minimum spec, drop it on the floor, and get kudos for it, while the rest of the devs run around picking up the pieces.