I was reading The Digital Doctor: Hope, Hype, and Harm at the Dawn of Medicine’s Computer Age and ran across a passage that resonated:
Everybody, of course, supports standardization—in theory. But human beings (particularly, but not exclusively, famous Harvard professors practicing at famous Boston hospitals) want things to be standardized their way. The difficulty that doctors face in accepting a workplace that is not custom-designed around their personal preferences is captured in this old joke about the physician staffs of hospitals: What do you call a 99-1 vote of the medical staff? A tie.
Examples abound: coding styles, version control systems, code review systems…
Tags: books, development, mozilla, quotes
See also: Havoc Pennington’s post today on A Spectrum of Overengineering