Software Engineering

I could have fixed it, but it turned out to be important, because if you get two good players they could just volley and play the game forever. And the game has to end in about three or four minutes otherwise it’s a failure as a game. So that gap at the top, again – a feature. So that was sort of a happy accident.

“Happy” primarily in the context of the industry – the goal of an arcade game was, after all, to bring in quarters, and this here was the unexpected equivalent of the zero in a casino roulette game. But I wonder if some of this bugginess/randomness also helped the game feel challenging and surprising, even for skilled players.

An engineer putting a piece of work on their backlog is effectively deferring it to never. It’s important enough to write it down somewhere and document that it exists as a bug or a feature enhancement, but it’s not important enough to act.

Yes, sometimes we ambitiously carve out time to “burn down the backlog”, but do you know what we pick from that list? We pick the interesting work. Interesting to code or interesting because of the impact on the feature. Some kind of interesting briefly elevates this work to relevance. The boring backlog work? You couldn’t pay me.

I’ve avoided keeping backlogs for most of my career because they behave like debt. You put the task on the card, feel good about not losing it, then pay interest every day you don’t do it. Grooming, triage, scrolling past the same broken link for the ninth month: all payment, none of it touching the principal.

Handing the list to an agent changes what the list is for. A backlog became a graveyard because writing work down was cheap and doing it was expensive. Close that gap and it’s a queue again. I still don’t want to keep one, but I’m less sure what I hated was the list rather than the price of acting on it.

This is the clearest case I’ve seen for why cheaper code doesn’t mean fewer engineers — it means more software, and more software still needs people to decide what to build and stand behind it.