samir, an unknown quantityHow many professional programmers are working on pointless and/or actively harmful products?
Give me your best guess.
(If you vote, please boost to diversify the results. It’s polite.)
0–25%
25–50%
50–75%
75–100%
Poll ended at .
Jeremy Wadhams@samir I imagine if your definition of "pointless" expands to include "ripoffs of things that already exist" the number approaches 90%. I myself spent years writing "Instagram for beauticians" because the venture capitalists were willing to ignore "but why wouldn't the beauticians just use the Instagram they have at home?"
Gerbrand van Dieyen@jeremywadhams @samir a lot of programming is creating something which already exists just in a slightly different combination. That doesn't make it pointless. If only, gaining understanding is already extremely useful, often reinventing is the only way to get understanding
@gerbrand Oh absolutely, I wouldn't discourage a developer from reimplementing tic-tac-toe or building a blog CMS. And I wouldn't stop someone whose vision of a better mousetrap was 95% conventional thinking, but that 5% novelty is a banger! But it's discouraging how many meetings I've been in that are "competitor X has feature Y, we need a shallow clone of Y bodged into our product immediately!"
@jeremywadhams one thing I had to learn to the hard way as junior software developer is that there's nothing wrong with programming something that may or may not already exist. Whether cms, lms, user management, caching, webshop, dao or any other kind of functionality
@jeremywadhams product management through copying features from competitors might not always be the path to success, indeed