My point was that you could fix it in one hour (or one week or one month), but the “X” is for writing reusable pieces of code, unit tests, documentation… Your manager has to believe in following best practices and standards when writing code, otherwise it will be hard to convince him/her that you need “extra” time to write better code.

Speaking of managers, here are a couple of articles I found interesting:

How NOT to lead geeks

Top Management Lies

Karl

If the constraint still exists, make sure the managers manager is well aware of that and wait for the pain and suffering of training a new manager, because the one making demands like that is not in the best interest of the company to keep around. Hopefully somebody with more brains farther up the chain of command will recognize that.

A company doesn’t continue to exist by setting its employees up to fail.

Consider this scenario: You are given a task to code a business rule or logic in, let’s say, PL/SQL. Your manager wants this task done in one hour, no questions asked.

You know that in order to do it right, you need at least 2 hours because you want to follow PL/SQL best practices, like writing reusable pieces of code, writing unit tests…

You also know that you can make it in one hour if you do not follow all the PL/SQL best practices (which I refer to as “quick and dirty”).

What will you do? What will you tell your manager?

I agree with Steve Feuerstein:

We all want to write better, more efficient, and more easily maintainable code. The challenge is figuring out how to do this while still meeting our deadlines (and finding time to spend with our families).

On a related note, here is a good article to read: Why we all sell code with bugs

Guess which two are usually selected? Oracle is no different than anyone else.