Hacker News Reader

"Best practices" is something you can advise on, write on, etc. - i.e. it is sellable.

Following (mandating) best practices immunizes (management) against being accused of doing things wrong. Might still fail, but then it failed despite doing everything "right".

Also, following "best practices" is much faster that creating solutions on your own: It will only get you to some sort of "average" in most cases, but that is what most places settle for these days.

View on HN

> best practices immunizes

I see this all the time when digging down into why. "It's ok to shut off my brain and just do X, regardless of whether it's situationally even useful." Just as bad as "Policy". It's ok to not think and find a good solution, as long as the bad solution looks "normal" enough.

Best practices are inherently decades old. It takes a long time for a good idea to spread and get people used to it. It's very likely there are better ways to solve the issue around, if you stop to think and read.

Because even the best decisions can fail, and unless you can be totally convincing not only to engineers but also people who are less technical (management or other stakeholders) when there's massive fallout, you're not going to want to explain why you weren't following "best practices".

Reply on news.ycombinator.com