(“a shortcut that saves me a day’s work now is OK, even it costs me ten days’ fixing in a year”)
I think it’s more that short-term thinking prevents even worrying about that future maintenance. Especially when stuff has to be fixed/released RIGHT NOW or when the developer is just fumbling along or sick of this particular problem at the moment.
Sometimes the opposite happens: overengineering and really robust design and perfect implementation of a feature that isn’t going to be used, or two weeks’ development time that will save someone a few minutes of work once a year.
I would add optimism bias to the list, which leads us to discount the possibility of unknown phenomena of unknown relevance.
This example wasn’t in the original article, so I assume @doctorow created it.
A Google search to find out what “bull-goose” is was very… interesting. Something to do with strap-ons, apparently.
Which bias is it where you deliberately do just the easy stuff and keep putting off the difficult work and then tell customers that it’s on the long term roadmap - scheduled for release in 2 years?
I’m gonna call it the Low Hanging Fruit bias.
hyperbolic discounting (“a shortcut that saves me a day’s work now is OK, even it costs me ten days’ fixing in a year”)
In some companies that’s called job security. Also, hourly pay.
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