Programmers should never make things worse. In order to do that,
you have to understand all the people who will be touched by
what you do.

In many cases, that is a lot of different types of people. I
used to think it was about 10 types of people, and it
would take a half a year to understand each enough to where you wouldn't
make patently offensive mistakes.

But now, there's at least twice the number of types of people. 2 times
five is ten.

Most software tools companies last less than six years. So not only
will you have to learn new customers, you'll have to work with a
toolchain that is invariably of lower quality than the one
that went out of business. People go out of software not for being
bad, but for being good. When you are done, you stop.

My estimates are based on *good* programmers. Ones who pretty much
got all they could out of school. The rest will become defensive and
use personal networks to shut down the ones who know what they are
doing.

It used to be the standard was "It works, except for this list of
errors." Now the standard is "It doesn't make anybody mad."

because that's easier to measure. It's noisier. but it's cheap.

--
Les Cargill