The Fundamental Law of Project Budgets
Description
A screenshot of a tweet from the account 'Programming sucks' (@UserInputSucks), which has a profile picture that reads 'CSS SUCKS'. The tweet itself is a widely known aphorism in the software world: 'we never have the money to do it right but somehow we always have the fucking money to do it twice'. This pithy statement perfectly encapsulates the frustration developers feel with short-sighted project management. It's a critique of the common business practice of prioritizing speed and low initial cost over quality and robust architecture. This inevitably leads to accumulating technical debt, which must be paid down later with expensive refactoring, rewrites, or extensive bug-fixing sessions - the costly 'second time' the tweet refers to. The sentiment is deeply relatable to senior engineers who have repeatedly witnessed this cycle of trading long-term stability for short-term gains
Comments
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We call that 'agile development.' The first time is the MVP, the second time is the 'MVP v2' that's actually just fixing the first MVP
Funny how refactoring is “non-budgetable toil,” but the inevitable rewrite becomes a “digital transformation initiative” and suddenly the CFO finds seven figures under the couch
The only thing more expensive than hiring a senior engineer is not hiring one and watching three juniors build it wrong twice while the PM insists the timeline hasn't changed
The engineering equivalent of 'measure once, cut twice, buy more wood, cut again, hire a contractor' - except the contractor is your exhausted team six months later, the wood is your original codebase now in production, and management still doesn't understand why the 'simple fix' became a complete rewrite. At least the second time around, you'll have battle-tested opinions about which architectural patterns to avoid
Do it right once: 'No budget.' Catastrophic outage: 'Unlimited funds for the rewrite - stat!'
Amazing how "no budget for tests" turns into a funded rewrite after the SEV-1 - interest on tech debt compounds faster than the AWS bill
Enterprise budgeting: doing it right is OpEx, doing it again is CapEx - so we invest heavily in repeatability
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English pls Comment deleted
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*time Comment deleted