Joel Schindall, an EE at MIT, tells a good story about this:
The ship date for a chip he was managing was just a few weeks away when he got a call from a supplier informing him that a key component would be delayed. Worried, he went to one of the engineers who designed the chip and told him of the problem.
The engineer was not concerned; "I thought they might not deliver that component, so I left extra space around it where we can add these additional parts that do the same thing."
Joel was happy, but surprised, and he took a closer look at the chip. "But you didn't leave extra space for other components on the chip."
"Yeah," the engineer replied, "I just didn't think those would be a problem."
One of the harder jobs in engineering and design is anticipating problems. That engineer took the time to think carefully about the problems that might arise with each of the components on the chip, prioritized the risk, and only spent the time to really carefully architect the parts of the circuit that were most likely to be trouble.
It seems that software is the same way; the best coders will assess the risk of all the code they write, and only spend their time and energy to protect against the problems that are most likely to arise. That leads to code that is better than "good enough" but is not over-architected. Of course, that intuition is really hard to develop and impossible to perfect.
The ship date for a chip he was managing was just a few weeks away when he got a call from a supplier informing him that a key component would be delayed. Worried, he went to one of the engineers who designed the chip and told him of the problem.
The engineer was not concerned; "I thought they might not deliver that component, so I left extra space around it where we can add these additional parts that do the same thing."
Joel was happy, but surprised, and he took a closer look at the chip. "But you didn't leave extra space for other components on the chip."
"Yeah," the engineer replied, "I just didn't think those would be a problem."
One of the harder jobs in engineering and design is anticipating problems. That engineer took the time to think carefully about the problems that might arise with each of the components on the chip, prioritized the risk, and only spent the time to really carefully architect the parts of the circuit that were most likely to be trouble.
It seems that software is the same way; the best coders will assess the risk of all the code they write, and only spend their time and energy to protect against the problems that are most likely to arise. That leads to code that is better than "good enough" but is not over-architected. Of course, that intuition is really hard to develop and impossible to perfect.