alt Hacker NewsYou can literally just do this. I’ve never gotten fired from a software engineering job for moving slower and building things that work well, work predictably, and are built to last.
Over a career of working at it, you get dramatically better at higher levels of quality even in earlier passes, so the same level of added effort provides increasing levels of reward as you gain experience.
Nobody ever complains about the person who’s leaving everything they touch a little cleaner than how they found it.
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> Nobody ever complains about the person who’s leaving everything they touch a little cleaner than how they found it.
This should be true, but it's not in my experience. Even small, clear improvements are rejected as off-mission or shunted to a backlog to be forgotten. Like, "cool, but let's hold off on merging this until we can be certain it's safe", or in other words "this is more work for me and I'd really rather not".
You can definitely go overboard for work. If you want to do it as a hobby, go nuts, but there isn't a point in overengineering far beyond what is needed (recall the Juicero)
Same. But it took learning to ignore everything every manager was telling me: Go faster, ship before I'm ready to ship, proceed without agreed-on and documented requirements, listen to product instead of customers, follow code conventions set by others...
> I’ve never gotten fired from a software engineering job for moving slower and building things that work well, work predictably, and are built to last.
In most companies, that’s not how it plays out. Once something works, you’re immediately moved on to the next task. If you’ve had the time and space to refine, polish, and carefully craft your code, you’ve been fortunate.