The Ikea Effect in Software

Man, it is so <i>not</i> about the IKEA effect.<p>This isn&#x27;t about some puppy-dog infatuation with a spice rack or a bird house. It&#x27;s about having your fucking time wasted, when you could have been out doing pretty much anything except coaxing some shitty interpreter to JIT compile a blob into some blinky lights for a herd of indecisive squawking ostrichs, amid their kangaroo court pecking order.<p>Hours of my life gone. And for what? A clicky-doo button at a company that might not exist in 10 years?

Not only does being around objective machines all day long not make us more objective, I think it has the opposite effect.<p>Specifically, programmers like to perceive themselves as being objective and logical. This opens a giant blind spot toward the biases that we do have. The resulting cognitive dissonance allows all kinds of irrational beliefs to fester.<p>I used to think that the most wonderful thing about working in engineering was that engineering organizations are meritocracies. Then I realized that a organization that genuinely <i>believes</i> itself to be a meritocracy while being rife with nepotism is actually much worse than an organization where cronyism happens out in the open!

I&#x27;d hoped the author would talk more about how cobbling an app together from 30 different npm packages is a wholly different experience from using only a few and designing the code to model the problem being solved, rather than being forced into a solution by your dependencies. The distinction is subtle but real. I submit that great software must be designed.

The antidote to that is to think about code as a draft. All code is a draft, one attempt among many, to solve a problem. A draft is a step to the future. A prototype of sorts.

Code is a liability. A light bulb went off when I first heard that.

I thought this would be about consumer software that forces the end user to &#x27;assemble&#x27; it someway, which would have been a super interesting essay.