Apparently my previous post is getting called out as “defensive” on the MacIndie blog. Well, again I assume it’s my post because the author so far hasn’t bothered to mention my post directly. Oh well. We’ll read between the lines and assume the author is targeting me. I’m not really worried if the post came over as defensive or not – it was merely stating why I believe that criticising and being open to criticism is a good thing.
I think the author is going along with Marcus’ original point: in that it is the almost solely senior members of the community who were critical. This is ignoring all the criticism from folks like John Gruber, Khoi Vinh, PC Mag (eww), The Daily Telegraph (double eww) and even the App reviews themselves (which as all good developers know – should be utterly ignored out of hand, because the peons know nothing!).
So this shows that it wasn’t just the old “grey beard” section of the Cocoa dev community(tm) – it was pretty much everybody. The app was wildly slammed by everyone because everyone saw it. It probably had the largest launch of any iOS app – and everyone saw it to be unpolished, slow, buggy and at the end of the day owned by a psychopath who makes Bond villains look huggable. In comparison the criticism from the old timers was relatively small (and if I recall correctly, tame).
Anyone parroting the “grey beard” line is either forgetting the mainstream criticism or is incapable of critical thinking.
I’m also a little bit confused because, no one officially knew who worked on the The Daily (although I’d say it was moderately common knowledge a few days after the launch). How can the community be accused of turning on one of its own if we had no clue who worked on the app? As far as we knew Murdoch probably outsourced it to indentured iOS child programmers in the jungles of Peru (no offense to real Peruvian child slave programmers – I’m sure you do great work).
A quick thought experiment: let’s say you were the client paying for the contractors (and sub-contractors) who worked on The Daily. Would you personally have been happy with the state it was in when it was released? I wouldn’t have been. I would have pushed as much as possible to move the deadline so that the blatant problems could be fixed. The fact that it was released anyway means to me, as is often the case with software, that making the deadline trumped the product quality.
I’d be really surprised if anyone was happy with the quality of the app when it was released (the same can almost always be said for any software release). So should we shut up when something is released with great fanfare and yet it, well quite frankly, isn’t very good? These hypothetical kids in Peru have it shit already, they’re working for the anti-christ as it is. Do they really need all these old timers they look up to and respect shitting on something they’ve poured their time and energy into?
The truth is children didn’t write the app. Grown adults did, adults who should expect and desire criticism from their peers. Not wanting or accepting criticism means you just want false platitudes. You don’t have to go too far to find them on the internet. Yes, writing software is hard work, we get it — but we all do it. Working as a sub-contractor to the anti-christ sounds like absolutely fucking miserable work, we get that too — but if you’ve got the stomach for it — good for you. But just because something is hard, or unpleasant to do — doesn’t mean that the end result doesn’t deserve criticism if it just isn’t very good.
That doesn’t diminish the fact that criticism is hard to take. It is, I’m personally awful at taking criticism. And developer egos are very fragile things and easily crushed. Having them crushed by your peers is certainly harder still. But without strong criticism, you end up applauding mediocrity. Fuck that. Give me a snarky bastard developer who tells me what I’m doing is crap. I’d take that any day over someone who tells me every single thing I do is wonderful.
I’ll end this post with words from Winston Churchill. who was much better at crafting them than I could ever hope to be:
“Criticism may not be agreeable, but it is necessary. It fulfils the same function as pain in the human body. It calls attention to an unhealthy state of things.”