I can kind of see the logic behind the author's first point. When I write code for fun, I don't write design docs or invite friends over for design reviews. I just do whatever I want, mostly typing in lines of code, until I can't stay awake anymore. And it is a lot of fun. The problem is, it's ignoring things like "making money" and "not annoying users" and things like that. When you need to engineer instead of play, then you need to think about things like: "how can I not write this code". And that's why you need design docs and design reviews and meetings: to learn, to share knowledge, and to ensure that your time spent programming is the best possible use of that time.
If someone said, "your job is to write as much code as possible and push to production every eight seconds", that would be fun. I just don't think the company would last longer than ten years. At that point, that company would do nothing but extinguish fires, and a new upstart would be doing "more with less" and out-innovate them. Name the popular tech companies from twenty years ago that you interact with on a daily basis today. Yeah.
I can kind of see the logic behind the author's first point. When I write code for fun, I don't write design docs or invite friends over for design reviews. I just do whatever I want, mostly typing in lines of code, until I can't stay awake anymore. And it is a lot of fun. The problem is, it's ignoring things like "making money" and "not annoying users" and things like that. When you need to engineer instead of play, then you need to think about things like: "how can I not write this code". And that's why you need design docs and design reviews and meetings: to learn, to share knowledge, and to ensure that your time spent programming is the best possible use of that time.
If someone said, "your job is to write as much code as possible and push to production every eight seconds", that would be fun. I just don't think the company would last longer than ten years. At that point, that company would do nothing but extinguish fires, and a new upstart would be doing "more with less" and out-innovate them. Name the popular tech companies from twenty years ago that you interact with on a daily basis today. Yeah.