And then I read that his hacked-together-in-3-days ssh server was for use in production. In a hosting service.
Wow. Just wow.
That sounds like a brilliant technical guy, capable of running with a daft idea to completion (unlike me, with my collection of at-best-half-built personal projects), who should have some layers of protection between him and Real World Production...
"Now, people who Get Things Done but are not Smart will do stupid things, seemingly without thinking about them, and somebody else will have to come clean up their mess later. "
Inexperienced (young) programmers don't know what's been tried, and what's available. I've been dealing with this a lot at work recently, where we ended up doing poor reimplementations of off-the-shelf stuff due to a mix of ignorance, and honestly, a bit of hubris.
It's a good attitude to have in academia/non-production critical work, but the GP is right, production demands a more conservative approach, especially when money/safety is at stake.
The type of ignorance Joel writes about (see parent) is different, it's more like "slavishly following design patterns" and "writing copy-and-pasted, improperly factored code". Both are ignorance, but the first is better called "NIH", whereas Joel's is, "writing bad code".
It's the "that you wrote" part.
No matter what language you write it in, you are going to mess something up. The OpenSSH guys have messed up working a lot smarter and more diligently and with more time than you have.
They've invested years and many talented people in developing such a piece of software.
If you want to write your own ssh server in php, you should probably consider your motivation and how you can re-use their code or operate through it instead if your purpose if anything other than experimentation.
Its kinda hard to disagree with that conclusion.
I can't say those difficulties he had in using the library were put there on purpose to keep people like him out, but it seems to be a good effect here.
What did I create a ssh server for? The same thing I created a DNS server for fun and for KalyHost.
There was some allusion to needing some kind of database backend for the SSH server, but there are multiple solutions for that now (like LDAP).
I'd love to have this guy work for me in a junior role (because he can really crank out the code), but all his work would need to be reviewed, and I wouldn't want him to be making architectural decisions on his own.
That said, "flawless accounting" would be very high up on my feature list. I think the failure here isn't launching without perfection; it's operating at scale without perfection.
I think minimum feature scope doesn't necessitate poor-quality software, just solutions that don't do everything for everybody. It's much better to ship a small feature set with very high quality, IMO, than a big feature set with low quality.
In the Lean Startup sense, the M is about minimum effort, and the V is about viability with customers. You're basically playing Battleship trying to discover where those two Venn circles overlap.
Different aspects of quality map to both those circles. There's build quality, which relates to the sustainability of the code base. There, you have to consider both short- and long-term quality. [1]
There's also quality as users perceive it. That varies widely by domain by market, and by how far you are along the adopter curve.
My general answer is the same as yours: minimal features with highly sustainable code. But for experiments, I think you can get away with terrible code as long as you a) throw it away quickly, and b) you are on it so even if you have a bad MTBF, your MTTR is really good.
I also think that you can tactically discard certain kinds of user-side quality. E.g., if I'm making a product for early-adopter financial traders, I'm not going to worry about quality of visual design, and I might inflict hard-to-learn interfaces on them. But I'd be rigorous about accounting and about UI issues that might lead to mistaken trades.
[1] I wrote some about that here: http://agilefocus.com/2009/06/22/the-3-kinds-of-code/
One of the biggest risks is, "nobody gives a fuck", which is why MVPs are so valuable. It lets you test market hypotheses.
But if you're building something handling real money, then a pretty obvious risk is, "The system will lose money beyond our capacity to absorb losses." Their failure to address that risk here is at best negligence.
But given the size of the loss, I don't think we should rule out fraud. The interesting question is, "When did they know they had a problem?" Sometimes shitty accounting systems are just naiveté. But when they persist over a long period of time in a way that just happens to cover up loss, embezzlement, or theft, then it's worth asking: did they keep the shitty accounting because better accounting would have forced them to admit something they were hoping to cover up?
Or do you mean this as a metaphor for MtGox? In that case, I would say that I would rather miss the window than be the famous asshole who -- oopsie! -- lost $500 million of other people's money.