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Yes, most places I've seen could barely get a minimally functioning product out. There is never even the opportunity to get to the point where an engineer's perfectionism might kick in. I've seen projects that spit out an average of 5 lines of compiler warnings for 1 line of source code, and that's when the code actually could be built successfully. The big open secret of the software industry is how barely everything works.

I practice my perfectionism at home, on hobby projects, where I can run lint with every option if I want, and resolve every warning, static analysis issue, style issue, I can profile my code and find/fix slow parts. I can run valgrind on it and find memory leaks. And I never have to release the software! None of these things were common practice in any software job I've ever had. It was always "Get it to barely work and then ship ship ship!"




> The big open secret of the software industry is how barely everything works.

Maybe it's the pessimism of age, but it feels like that describes all biology, economies, politics, etc...




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