alt Hacker NewsI think you're missing the point of the poster you are replying to. You make it sound like 3 weeks is 3 years. It ain't.
Very little, or possible nothing at all, is going to change in 3 weeks. If you are that myopic - as the XP people were - then constant failure is not going to be surprising. It will be expected.
It’s not about the specific timeframe. It’s about something that has no value for today’s context superseding something that do. It’s ok to anticipate changes, it’s not ok to act as if they’re already here when it’s clear that they’re not.
And the other axis is the lean towards complexity.
Let’s say you need to add logging for a web app to be able to quickly troubleshoot it. The design was to create a simple module that printf to stderr. But then the dev comes to you with a new complicated design involving elastic search and what not, saying that we will need it in 3 weeks to dissect the logs, etc. It may have been a good idea, but it’s not valuable. The correct idea is to put that on the backlog, not to start writing code for it.
Implementing complicated idea takes more time than implementing simple idea, while the value is the same.
When there’s a need for having something elastic search for the logs, it will be easy to refactor the simple code that we have than fixing the possibly flawed implementation that would have resulted if we went with the complex design.