I have been working on other people’s bugs for the last couple of weeks and it has been a terribly painful experience. This has been a great experience which has taught me a lot of corrective measures for the roadmap ahead for me. Some basic observations are Not everyone can program or should program - Conceptually it is really easy to type in read a tutorial or 2. But what i saw is pure torture for a guy like me , you need some talent to write a decent application. Bad deadlines always means bad code - I come from a difficult school where we more often than not had hard deadline on coding. More often than not best practices go for a toss when you do not set realistic deadline. Not all developers can be good managers - Very obvious , but unless one can see it in practice all is theory i would say. This is confirmed after repeated experiments Focus on the meat, rest is crap - People start focusing on the fringes far too often, look into the core and there is so much to be done always. It does seem that fringes are always better for the ego and easier to handle. Hiring people from good schools does not cover up older issues - It really unfair on “people” from good schools to have to clean up the mess, hire well from start and focus on building a clean application if not a “high performance” one.
Thats all to be honest, there will be always more to say. I have always believed that the mistakes are on both the sides when things fail (some more than others although), but these are things which are observed over a variation of organisation and individuals.