Simon Willison’s Weblog

You can’t win

Software organizations tend to reward programmers who (a) write lots of code and (b) fix lots of bugs. The best way to get ahead in an organization like this is to check in lots of buggy code and fix it all, rather than taking the extra time to get it right in the first place.

Posted 15th July 2002 at 9:36 pm

This is You can’t win by Simon Willison, posted on 15th July 2002.

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2 comments

Scott Adams, of Dilbert fame, once told a story about a company who paid coders a twenty-dollar bonus for each bug they fixed. One guy, obviously fast on his feet, made seventeen hundred dollars before they realised that the coders fixing bugs were the same guys who wrote the code in the first place...
sil - 15th July 2002 21:39 - #
This ties in with the cost-cutting exercise of getting your customers to be beta-testers and find all those bugs for you
Paul Freeman - 16th July 2002 10:59 - #

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Previously hosted at http://simon.incutio.com/archive/2002/07/15/youCantWin