getluky.net

Feature f*cking: when you work nights and weekends to get a release or product shipped, and then the first thing that some people do is deliver a negative and disheartening soliloquy about what features it lacks.

Usage in real life:

You: “I just released this new thing! Check it out!”

Them: “You know, this would be good if only it had these billion features.”, or “I can’t believe you didn’t do X, are you stupid!?”

You: “Dude, you’re totally feature f*cking my product right now.“

Please just take this at face value, as a way of a defusing a negative situation with some good old fashioned vulgarity.

However, if you really want to know the full (mostly depressing) meaning behind the phrase, read on.

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The choice to launch a product signifies an inflection point where the software works and fulfills an key need far more often than it breaks, and the fundamental use cases have been addressed. Chances are, the vision for the product is already far out there and the billion features suggested may already be in mind, but the reality of shipping code forces practical constraints on everything. It’s a compromise like that of politics, the “art of the possible.”

Of course, I understand people feel the need to deliver litanies of features.

Sometimes, it’s a genuine need that hasn’t been addressed (like internationalization). In most of those cases, the features will be addressed when possible and the developers have energy, but not before. However, ranting and raving about how idiotic a developer is because they haven’t internationalized yet is NOT the proper way to go about encouraging a developer to do so.

Other times, for the tech elite, there is too much software released to actually use it at all. It’s much easier for them to “see the big picture,” where every new product is just a puzzle piece joining in assembly of a vast futurist perspective. Keeping abreast of every startup that appears is surely overwhelming for anyone, and I can understand that to some, the only way to cope is to treat the creations of techies as assemblies of features that are always disappointingly short of science fiction.

The hidden story here is that of developer happiness. No matter how many community managers are out there trying to politely thank people for negative feedback, there are always human beings behind them writing code and deciding which features they are excited to work on or not. Certainly it is true that professionalism is somewhat about doing what you need to do despite whether you want to do it. However, the attention to detail and love of a product is difficult to cultivate in a negative atmosphere. Hearing about all the features you’re lacking or missed is one pretty negative way to influence a developer’s opinion of work that they probably had to do anyway.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, October 24th, 2007 at 1:13 pm and is filed under Tech. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.