Doing the Right Thing the Wrong Way

Another big mistake is to imagine that just knowing what to accomplish is sufficient. It's not.

Maybe if you really, truly, could know what to build, get it perfectly right the first time, and never have to change it again, quality wouldn't matter.

Even oracular powers won't prevent you from having to change your code, though, because shifting market conditions mean that what you need tomorrow isn't necessarily the same as what you'll need a year from tomorrow.

The ability to change code quality is valuable on its own, for that very reason. The fact that it mitigates our inability to guess what people want or what will happen in the future is just an extremely useful side-effect.

Doing the Wrong Thing the Right Way

One failure mode that is very common for us is spending all your energy on technical excellence without making sure you're working toward the right goal.

You can be a true hotshot and still miss the mark. No matter how exceptional your skills are or how clean your code is, it won't matter if you apply them to building the wrong thing.

While technical excellence does help you change direction when you realize your mistake, I've seen far too many developers go far too long before learning they weren't even realizing a meaningful objective.

Make sure to continuously invest at least a little energy in finding out if what you're doing even matters.

Error Modes

I've decided to start cataloging things developers do to shoot themselves in the foot.

I don't want to get too negative but I think knowing what to avoid is as important as knowing what to do.

I'll try to tag all such posts with the "error modes" tag I used on this one.