Aiming for the second time

I was chatting to a colleague and he mentioned how he had written some code and expected it to work first time and was surprised when it didn’t.

I would hope we all write code with an aim that it should work with no bugs or problems. Obviously we are not perfect, well I’m not anyway, and it very rarely happens that something we write works first time.

However occasionally it can happen.

At the point where we should be “celebrating”, we both agreed that our natural reaction was to question if we had missed something or maybe we had tested it the wrong way.

We are surprised when it doesn’t work and surprised when it does.

Instead of revelling in the achievement, there is an assumption that there must be a problem.

Many years ago at a consultancy I was working at, an external auditor decided to pick the project I was working on. They found one small issue which was very easy to resolve. Afterwards, my boss at the time gave me a piece of advice - make sure it is not perfect. Always leave something easy to find and easy to fix as they will keep searching until they find something so they feel like their audit was worthwhile.

Maybe we would have been better off having a small error than getting it working first time? Perhaps our brain needs that feeling of finding something that is wrong to feel like there was effort involved in the task.

Or maybe it is just me.