The Ikea Effect in Software
medium.comMan, it is so not about the IKEA effect.
This isn't about some puppy-dog infatuation with a spice rack or a bird house. It's about having your fucking time wasted, when you could have been out doing pretty much anything except coaxing some shitty interpreter to JIT compile a blob into some blinky lights for a herd of indecisive squawking ostrichs, amid their kangaroo court pecking order.
Hours of my life gone. And for what? A clicky-doo button at a company that might not exist in 10 years?
It's not just at little companies that might be ephemeral. I work for a large media enterprise and have built a platform over more than half a year for them to repeatedly waffle on whether or not they will use it each production round before moving against it at the last second. They requested I build it in the first place, and continue to bring up the issue to draw me back to development hours with new issues or feature requests. It hasn't been used in production end-to-end once. Madness.
It ends up making me look terribly unproductive and ineffectual. Thankfully I have had good bosses who understand and back me up regardless.
Hey, it's a job. If your company wants you to build something useless, and it is not your responsibility to determine whether the idea is sound or not, just build it.
Of course, this decreases the immaterial part of your value equation, so the company needs to pay you more to compensate. This is the part most companies fail to understand.
Okay, bake me 100 of your best cakes by tomorrow morning, and watch me flush them down the toilet, or alternatively, throw them in your face, depending on my opinion of their decorations. Now let's continue with this arrangement, every day, for 5 years.
Your response might be "Please pay me enough, and of course I will." or "Hey, you paid for the cakes, what do I care?"
So, how much does five years of your life cost? Is that what developers make? What else would you throw five years away on for that money? Would you rob a bank, and do a five year prison sentence for the same amount?
At some point the trade between effort and wasted time gets negotiated by qualifiers. These kinds of things do start to matter, eventually.
Not only does being around objective machines all day long not make us more objective, I think it has the opposite effect.
Specifically, programmers like to perceive themselves as being objective and logical. This opens a giant blind spot toward the biases that we do have. The resulting cognitive dissonance allows all kinds of irrational beliefs to fester.
I used to think that the most wonderful thing about working in engineering was that engineering organizations are meritocracies. Then I realized that a organization that genuinely believes itself to be a meritocracy while being rife with nepotism is actually much worse than an organization where cronyism happens out in the open!
Agreed. Though I'd add that objectivism itself pursued and achieved as an end goal successfully , opens blind spots as well especially to things like heuristics and intuition. Basically anywhere where models don't exist or are too flaky. The IKEA effect as a weakness should be about letting go of ego as a virtue rather than objectiveness as a virtue.
I'd hoped the author would talk more about how cobbling an app together from 30 different npm packages is a wholly different experience from using only a few and designing the code to model the problem being solved, rather than being forced into a solution by your dependencies. The distinction is subtle but real. I submit that great software must be designed.
The antidote to that is to think about code as a draft. All code is a draft, one attempt among many, to solve a problem. A draft is a step to the future. A prototype of sorts.
Code is a liability. A light bulb went off when I first heard that.
I thought this would be about consumer software that forces the end user to 'assemble' it someway, which would have been a super interesting essay.