Comment by chrisabrams | Hacker News Reader

Comment by chrisabrams | Hacker News Reader

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An observation here is that a house or a boat is something that people can see; we've all seen a building go under construction whether it a single family home or an office building. It takes time, and we know you can't rush the process or risk the building being unstable.

With software, many parts of the business can't "see" the development happening, so they don't know why it would take so long. At the same time, unlike a boat or building, software is more likely to be easily modified. Therefore there is less of a risk to get it all right initially. I do not condone said behavior I am merely pointing out a possible scenario in which it could happen.

It is also true that a developer is more likely to be a push over than a general contractor. Source: 11 years as as software engineer and my family has been involved with land and real estate for a long time.

I’ve found it really helpful to communicate and train funders to learn how to watch software being built. It takes time to teach someone to look at builds and tests and growing code and activity and demo releases. It also takes time to teach developers not to game this.

It’s amazing how much this helps build trust. It’s hard when there truly are big giant components that take a long time between commits and builds. But I think those are much rarer than programmers think and say.

>It also takes time to teach developers not to game this.

That's a massive ask unless management stops using their old style of management immediately while learning instead of slowly transitioning. There is zero reason for employees to stop protecting themselves from their incompetent managers. This is especially true in software where the average job length is much shorter, so you get less of a benefit from investing time into helping train a boss

The reason is trust. That’s nonzero but really hard to establish.

I’ve seen projects with untrustworthy devs and untrustworthy managers. Oddly sometimes that worked. But I’m too old to work in hellish environments for pay.

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