It's often subtle or intentionally hidden features that cost the most in the long term. Yammer has long had a feature that allows you to begin a message with "to:" and a username to send a private message to someone, or followed by a group name to post to a group. This probably took me an hour to implement, test and deploy back in early 2008. I have easily spent 40 hours of my time -- and, necessarily, 40 hours of others' time -- over the intervening 5 years explaining this feature and its justification.
One likely reason why an engineer - as opposed to a sales or customer support rep(1) - might end up spending as much as 40 hours explaining and justifying a trivial, implemented and documented feature would be a culture obsessed by removing perceived cruft.
(1) If competent sales or customer support reps spend 40 hours talking about a feature then some conceivable variant of it has some perceived value to someone...
I have to say that two man-weeks in 5 years for a feature with pretty high utility doesn't seem that much of a burden. However, I'm quibbling over words- I agree with the general thrust of his argument.
It's often subtle or intentionally hidden features that cost the most in the long term. Yammer has long had a feature that allows you to begin a message with "to:" and a username to send a private message to someone, or followed by a group name to post to a group. This probably took me an hour to implement, test and deploy back in early 2008. I have easily spent 40 hours of my time -- and, necessarily, 40 hours of others' time -- over the intervening 5 years explaining this feature and its justification.
One likely reason why an engineer - as opposed to a sales or customer support rep(1) - might end up spending as much as 40 hours explaining and justifying a trivial, implemented and documented feature would be a culture obsessed by removing perceived cruft.
(1) If competent sales or customer support reps spend 40 hours talking about a feature then some conceivable variant of it has some perceived value to someone...