You Like the Tool More Because You Built It

Three years ago
you wrote the deploy tool.

It was a weekend project
that got out of hand.

It works.

Mostly.

It has a few habits
only you understand,
and a channel where people ask you
what they mean.

Now somebody suggests
replacing it
with something everybody else uses.

And you find yourself
with a long list of reasons
why that would be a mistake.

Some of the reasons are good.

Some are about you.

Psychologists have a name for this.

The IKEA effect.

In a set of experiments
published in 2012,
people who assembled
a plain storage box themselves
were willing to pay more for it
than people handed
the same box built.

People who folded origami
valued their own clumsy paper cranes
almost as highly
as ones made by experts.

Effort
turns into affection,
and affection
looks a lot like judgment
from the inside.

Engineers are more exposed to this
than most people,
because so much of what we use
we built.

The internal framework.

The query helper.

The way the build scripts are laid out.

Each one carries your weekends,
and that weight shows up
in every comparison.

So do not trust the feeling.

Check it.

Before the meeting,
write down what the tool must do,
in terms a newcomer would understand.

Score your tool
and the alternative
against that list,
not against each other.

Then ask someone
who did not build either
to score them too.

If their numbers
look nothing like yours,
that is the effect,
measured.

Ask what the tool costs
the people who are not you.

The questions in the channel.

The onboarding page.

The bus factor
of one.

Sometimes you will keep it,
and you will be right.

Sometimes you will retire it,
and feel a loss that has nothing
to do with the code.

Both are fine.

What matters
is that you knew which one
was talking.

What you made
is worth exactly what it does,
not what it cost you.

– Serguey Asael Shinder