I can understand people removing polish things like that if there are usability concerns, but those small things add up to a lot in an end product and are a joy to find and explore.

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cobalt_(video_game)

https://duckduckgo.com/?t=ffab&q=neil+degrasse+tyson+gives+j...

If you're the kind of developer who likes to "sand and finish the back side of the cabinet," either you need to find a very rare, special company, or do it at home as a hobby.

But yeah, if you only care about checking the feature boxes.. Go ahead, make shit software with miserable people, but be sure to prepare to go out of business.

It comes from tinkering.

I worked at large companies, and there are reasons beyond that. I've been on the both sides of this fence.

Senior engineers feel the pain of supporting all these features. You created a new streaming API prototype that provides a gradual response, progressively displaying details of the 3D model? Great. But it's 15000 lines of dense code without a lot of explanation. Who is going to support it once you leave the company? Is it secure? How does it work with kiosk-type browsers? Can you write a formal proposal so we can start the review process?

Oh, I see that you're already leaving the company :(

And that's also why startups are often so much more successful initially. They just don't care about the long-term support and YOLO a lot of functionality.

This is like if you were renovating your house and the drywall guy spends a huge amount of time building up round corners, but you just wanted regular square corners. Then on some drywall forum they're bitching about how "all clients are stupid" or something.

That’s an aesthetic call, not a “who can do the math” call.

“Good news, I accurately simulated the particulate load in the local atmosphere—so now you authentically can’t read the text on a given smoggy winter morning!”

(FWIW, grace for management decisions notwithstanding, I think what gp did is awesome, and would switch on full realism mode every time :)

It's not that simple. There's possibly better ways to deal with it, but for safety-critical stuff (like a navigation display in a vehicle), simple is much, much better. In many cases, there's actually laws and liability stuff involved.

I once spent six months, developing an "un-asked-for" WiFi control app for a digital camera, and had it nuked. It worked much better than the shipping app (which was enjoying a richly-deserved one-star rating in the app store).

The considerations had a lot to do with the corporate Process (note the capital "P"), which I sidelined. I thought I could do better, but the people with the hands on the brake, thought different. I didn't kiss the right rings. That's a very real consideration in any corporation.

As a manager, however, I did go to bat for employees that displayed initiative. In some cases, I was successful. In some cases, not so much.

We aren't painting sistine chapels, we are running the plumbing in the sistine chapels basement. The job doesn't exist to give you emotional fulfillment. A mason doesn't insist that a client who needs a warehouse must pay him to spend a week detailing corbelled brick cornices. He makes a CMU wall, in the cheapest and most efficient way that still gets the job done.

It's profoundly disrespectful when we build monuments to our own ego instead of just getting the work done and it speaks to a professional immaturity of the highest order. That was one of the hardest lessons I learned as a fresh engineer and I see so often others that are just learning it. Sometimes people never learn it.

Sure, but in plumbing - or any trade - there is a huge spectrum of quality of work. Tons of little details add up that confer the person’s skill level to anyone checking it out in the future.

> It's profoundly disrespectful when we build monuments to our own ego instead of just getting the work done and it speaks to a professional immaturity of the highest order.

When I insist that something must be done a certain way, it’s not for my ego, it’s because I know that a year from now, I will be called upon to fix it during an incident if I don’t do it right this time. I am so absolutely sick of hacky bandaids being thrown on the ever-increasing pile of tech debt. To me, it’s profoundly disrespectful when product tells engineering that yet again, they will not yield time to fix the backlog, and to ship New Feature X.

You could've sold it with telling them Vincent Van Gogh's paintings had the location of stars accurately, you were inspired by those paintings to reproduce the sky color accurately.

That doesn't apply to every single instance of those, but if the sky isn't the focus of your application, a realistic one is just a distraction.

This one always gets me in how dirty the sky must have been "back in the day" in order for people to see a yellow sun. I've never looked into what gas would be needed to make the sun look yellow, but it must have been hell to breathe.

The reality is that we have certain conventions that are immediately understandable, and that too much visual complexity results in confusion rather than clarity.

If the sky is hazy white when I expect it to be blue, I'm confused as to whether it's the sky or if the map is still loading. It's adding cognitive complexity for no reason. Stars similarly serve no functional purpose at night.

What you built sounds great for an actual planetary view like Google Earth. And it sounds fun to build. But it's an anti-feature for a navigation view. When you're navigating, simplicity and clarity are paramount. Not realism.

Also the phrase "know your audience". No sense in casting pearls before the swine.

In this case the higher ups may have been confused due to, say, looking at the app while indoors (and from the perspective of "let's judge this developer's work"), while the actual users would see it in a vehicle alongside the real sky (and from the perspective of "let's see how easy this is to match up with reality").

That's a management thumbprint on the deliverable.

But when it's embedded software on physical devices where the business will have to incur cost in order to ship and hit those users, I can absolutely see why management would do the same thing as what all of the competitors are doing.

...it's the software frameworks. A new screen size. A different color depth. A bug when the graphics library is upgraded for antialiasing. Etc.

Also, devices already sold often get updates, so it's not even just about future devices.

That said there are niches where jobs let you do cool stuff all the time. Hard to find. Probably why gaming jobs are notoriously underpaid and overworked.