How sharp is your axe?

Abraham Lincoln once said, “Give me six hours to chop down a tree, and I will spend the first four sharpening the axe.” Since I first read this quote 15 years ago, I have always applied it to my life. Obviously, this is even more true in programming.

We’ve seen countless developers jump right into a feature with no preparation. You don’t judge a developer by the number of lines they code or the number of commits they make – that would be quite dumb, to be honest.

We like to tell our clients that programming is 70% thinking and 30% coding. It’s not shocking for us to see developers evaluating for days before committing anything. A lot of micromanagers start panicking after 1 or 2 days because they don’t see a visual representation of work being done. To me, this is like being stressed about not seeing your house being built two days after giving your architect the green light to start drawing up plans.

Anyhow, this is just a short post to say that if you have great developers, give them the time they need to work. They will write much better code, which will most likely prevent future technical debt, all while being way happier to have the freedom to do the right thing. It’s a win-win.