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- Path: lasernet.com!jonathan_wooldridge
- Newsgroups: comp.lang.c++
- Message-ID: <60118190238$71C7@lasernet.com>
- X-Gateway: Act-Up 4.6 18 Jan 96 19:02:38 LaserNet, Serving Fido style systems
- Date: Thu, 18 Jan 96 18:41:33 LOC
- Organization: 1BBS ■ Imperial Beach CA ■ 619∙429∙6521/6123 ■ (52:1000/153)
- From: Jonathan Wooldridge <jonathan_wooldridge@lasernet.com>
- In-Reply-To: Glenn Mandelkern
- Subject: Difficulty hiring people with C++ experience.
-
- -=> Quoting Glenn Mandelkern to All <=-
-
- GM> I value the desire for high quality. Yet I have experienced times
- GM> when quality is another substitute for a deadly word, perfectionism.
- GM> If perfectionism is not guarded, it leads to procrastination. Please
- GM> under- stand I am not saying that mediocre software should be released.
- GM> At the same time, realize that by delaying in being too perfect, a
- GM> competitor can use that to his advantage, and release a slick product
- GM> before you. Then you have the added burden of showing why your product
- GM> is superior. Meanwhile, no one will be on the sidelines to award you
- GM> extra credit points for quality. In an ideal world, professionalism
- GM> would guarantee profits. But in the real world, there are plenty of
- GM> ways to make products besides being book smart.
- GM> So when it comes to hiring C++ programmers, I would hope they would be
- GM> market savvy as well.
-
- Market savvy, as you so eloquently put it, can be an excuse as well.
- Let's use Real World examples. Strike Commander, by Origin, took several
- years to develop. They experienced re-starts, and when they demo'd their
- landscape rendering engine prior to release, suddenly copycats abounded.
- Rather than ship to beat the competition, they held off, and it's been
- a terrific success. MechWarrior II is the same way. They scrapped the
- original code and Earthseige beat them to the marketplace, but
- Mechwarrior II reigns supreme, because it is just plain BETTER.
-
- The race to get to production first is a marketing fallacy. Look at the game
- Ascendancy. It is unfinished code. Browse the *.COB files, and you will
- see that they never completed the alien descriptions, let alone the
- implementation. They rushed it to beat out their competitors, and lost.
- Look at the platform systems--Sony PlayStation waited for development
- of their software to release, and it paid off. The competition released
- early and lost, because the games weren't developed yet!
-
- So from these real examples, I draw the conclusion that it is far better
- to wait until the fruit is ripe, than to pick it green, and dye it.
-
- -SpyroGyra
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