I’ve been there. Most developers have. Most developers stay there:
Over-generalizing solutions and obsessing over tech.

Sure, we’ll rationalize about it. We’ll argue things like:

• We’ll need this in a year from now, to support feature X.
• Let’s make sure we can extend this data in any way we want in the future.
• This code should be reusable, so others can use this for their projects too – while we’re at it, let us turn it into a library/framework.
• If we just develop this tool now, we’ll be able to work 3x faster in a couple of months.
• Community Best Practices say we should do it like this, these are proven practices that will make our product better.
• We can do this 10x better than those guys who wrote library X, give me 3 weeks and you’ll see.
• This is never going to be performing/scaling once we get to 10.000 concurrent users, we need to make sure everything is optimized for launch as we might get slashdotted.

What is much harder to admit is that we are often rationalizing about this, because we do not want to admit that we want to build something in a certain way because it is fun, motivating, exciting and a great way to learn some new tech.

Catering to our technology fetish however, we tend to end up with:

• Over-complicated solutions, often orders of magnitude more complicated than needed to solve the given business needs.
• More code. Even if you write the most readable and maintainable code possible, more code is still more code – more to read and more to maintain.
• Technical solutions that are hard to hand-over and hard to introduce new employees to.
• A lot of wasted effort that usually amounts to zero – yes zero – business value.

Value as motivational driver

While obsessing over tech can be very motivating, fun and exciting, nothing really beats seeing your hard work in the hands of the end-users. Seeing their reactions, getting feedback and knowing that you (hopefully) improved their life a tiny bit with your new release.

If we are not releasing often, we tend to forget how motivating this actually is. The less often you release, the more likely you are to fall into the trap of finding motivation in tech solutions instead.

Value-driven motivation tends to align with business expectations and goals, tech obsessed motivation on the other hand tend to go against these. While it is easy enough to convince the business that we need some fancy tech, our goal should be to bring as much value to the business and end users as possible.

Interested to know how to approach this more practically?
See my next post Practical steps towards value-driven development.