> Anyone diligently following due process would've come to the same conclusion.
> To me, the solution was obvious
> I will never get funding for such a project,
> bad approach enshrined in bad design,
> He works very fast, and often volunteers to help customers directly by adding more untested features to the product.
> He sees himself a hero, someone who day after day saves the company from devastating consequences of... his earlier bad ideas.
What I'm hearing is this guy delivers features to the customers, but your ideas are better, obviously.
If they were obviously better, you'd be able to secure funding to do them. What I think is actually happening is you've been unable to demonstrate the value of your ideas, or convince people they are valuable. The conclusion I am drawing here is that you haven't shown that your way is better - you just believe it is.
My belief is that the attitude that people suck if they write tests that must be ordered, "indicates a lack of understanding that finding the right balance of speed, cost and quality is a compromise." But, many developers believe that their pure code is just always "better".
> What I'm hearing is this guy delivers features to the customers, but your ideas are better, obviously.
Well, then you need to pay more attention... Your interpretation is wrong.
> If they were obviously better, you'd be able to secure funding to do them.
You don't understand the difference between quality and pricing policy. Best food is not the "fast food", even though customers love it and it's cheap. The "fast food" is causing obesity epidemic, diabetes epidemic and a bunch of other health-related issues that, in the grand scheme of things make the savings on the food quality not worth it. But, for some people it's easy to weasel their way out of this problem by pretending that repercussions don't exist, and that they will bear no responsibility for the consequences.
The "deliver features to the customers" guy is the one who internalizes profits and externalizes expenditures. He's a douche canoe. There's nothing positive about people like him. The fact that he gets budget to do idiotic and harmful things is not because they are valuable, but because this creates a condition for a scam that profits those funding him.
In the same way how not everyone is a dietologist and cannot be expected to assess the value of the food they eat, and so has to rely on experts, the customers using our software will not know how well different features of our software are implemented. All they have to go off is a changelog and some promotional materials. There's enough of a time buffer between the customers buying the product and discovering how crappy it is for the product authors to still make profits. And, given the conditions of our market, where the product we make is, basically, without competition, even if the customers discover it's true quality, they'll come back bagging to fix things rather than bail on us. Which gives even more freedom to the "deliverers of features to the customers".
> Well, then you need to pay more attention... Your interpretation is wrong.
> You don't understand the difference between quality and pricing policy. Best food is not the "fast food", even though customers love it and it's cheap.
> There's nothing positive about people like him.
This is the exact problem I'm getting at: Individuals don't get to unilaterally declare what good software is, what the worth of people is, what people do or don't understand.
This guy may in fact have a more nuanced and "better" understanding of software and what goes into making it, than you. Prove that he doesn't! If you can, you can take that proof into work and take his job!
> To me, the solution was obvious
> I will never get funding for such a project,
> bad approach enshrined in bad design,
> He works very fast, and often volunteers to help customers directly by adding more untested features to the product.
> He sees himself a hero, someone who day after day saves the company from devastating consequences of... his earlier bad ideas.
What I'm hearing is this guy delivers features to the customers, but your ideas are better, obviously.
If they were obviously better, you'd be able to secure funding to do them. What I think is actually happening is you've been unable to demonstrate the value of your ideas, or convince people they are valuable. The conclusion I am drawing here is that you haven't shown that your way is better - you just believe it is.
My belief is that the attitude that people suck if they write tests that must be ordered, "indicates a lack of understanding that finding the right balance of speed, cost and quality is a compromise." But, many developers believe that their pure code is just always "better".