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Comment by __MatrixMan__ | Hacker News Reader

Agreed. You can write prose or implementations or tests beforehand and I don't think it matters too much which you choose, just as long as you give yourself a phase 2 for incorporating the learning you did in phase 1 and put a reality check of some kind in between them.

The only problem with having the draft being implementation is that maybe you'll get pressured into shipping the draft.

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I’ve had to ship the draft a few times in my career. Usually when the actual code would have been weeks or months more of work (draft has poor architecture, while a proper architecture would have been just as much work as the draft). Twice it was due to showing a demo and a decision maker in the audience said “we can sell this tomorrow” or something to the same effect for that org. In one case, we ran a simple a/b test as a proof of concept on whether to pursue the idea further and it added an extra million bucks a year in revenue. Nobody wanted to wait for a proper implementation. All that code is still in production, slow as shit and nobody wants to fix something that isn’t broken.

If you have a draft, keep it to yourself. Use it as a personal reference when writing the design, or share snippets. Other engineers will realize you have a draft, business people won’t.

I like where your head is at but if you keep it to yourself then you can't get feedback on it.

I once did the draft with ncurses as a hedge against it becoming the real thing. It didn't go over especially well but it was fun.

The time spans for doing it properly or shipping are maybe a bit muddled here, but if you can make a million dollars by shipping something now, you should probably ship it now. If the code is that bad (ie can end up costing way more to maintain than fix) then you should afterward immediately fix it. Side benefit is you’ll probably learn a lot about doing it right from the prod system.

Oh we tried to fix it and never succeeded. As soon as other teams found out about it, they started using it too. To be honest, had we waited to do it right, we potentially could have made even more money.

I'm not sure what you mean by "should". If your job is to build things that aren't going to fail in ways that later end the company or hurt people, then finding ways to keep the:

> But we could make an additional million next quarter if we ship it now

...crowd in check is probably what you should be doing.

> In one case, we ran a simple a/b test as a proof of concept on whether to pursue the idea further and it added an extra million bucks a year in revenue.

I'm with the people who decided to ship this. The organization will need to fund more maintenance than they would if they waited, but that has real costs. And "keep your 1mm/revenue idea to yourself" doesn't sound like a healthy engineering culture either.

Heh, yeah, that is a special case though. Most people don't work on things that has that kind of impact. If it might, I would suggest going against my own advice.

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