Tuesday, September 27, 2011

Linus Torvalds Management Lessons

See the recent article on management lessons from Linus Torvalds.  Some important call-outs:

On external quality:
Torvalds concludes, “Way too many projects seem to think that the code is more important than the user, and they break things left and right, and they don't apologize for it, because they feel that they are ‘fixing’ the code and doing the right thing.”
On tooling:

“I don't think tools are all that fundamentally  important.”
“Now, what is important is that there's a good workflow for the project, and tools can certainly help with that,” said Torvalds. “But most projects don't necessarily really need tools. There's a lot of projects that simply don't have enough changes to really require any tools at all for their work flow; [...]"

1 comment:

  1. I agree completely with his observation on external quality. The code is only relevant to the user if it is so badly written that it impedes adding features or fixing bugs.

    My biggest complaint about most programming "concepts" that they focus on "good" code when the customer couldn't care less if it was written in assembler, so long as it works.

    Don't get me wrong, I am all in favor of clean, readable code. But when we lose site of the customer's needs, we have broken the system.

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