Your email is about to be sent to several hundred thousand people, who will have to spend at least 10 seconds reading it before they can decide if it is interesting. At least two man-weeks will be spent reading your email. Many of the recipients will have to pay to download your email.
I wish HN had this warning next to the "add comment" button. It would improve my posts.
Your message is about to be sent to several hundred thousand very bored people that have nothing better to do. At least two man-weeks worth of time will be spent reading your message instead of looking at lolcats.
It's fun to think everyone is participating because they value everyone else's commentary, but HN is really just a bunch of talkative people mentally in between other tasks.
Poul-Henning Kamp is an incredible FreeBSD hacker, started the varnish project, and was a fantastic person to follow when I subscribed to the freebsd-* mailing lists. He's one of my hacker superstars.
The most common bikeshed problem with web development is with design and user interface. We nicknamed this the 'cornflower blue' problem (fight club reference). Everybody thinks they know what good UI and design is, and they will certainly let you know what they think is right.
I am sure many of you have had the exact same problem, and have also resorted to hiding a new project from various staff members just to prevent the project from becoming a quagmire.
My heart goes out to all passionate, dedicated graphic designers. Who would do this job? Not I, for all the tea in China.
Not only does everyone think they know what good design is, and let you know what they think is right, they'll be looking at you thinking 'what do we need you for? why are we wasting money on you?'
You need to first justify your existence, then justify your abilities to people who know better anyway. Who needs this grief?
The bikeshed email (I knew of it before I knew of Parkinson's work) was a defining moment for me in software development. I refer to it often. It was even the subject of my longest blog post: http://softwaremaven.innerbrane.com/2010/03/why-you-care-abo....
It is interesting that this email came up today on HN, along side the article from Zed Shaw on how he is dropping the Python requirement from Mongrel2 and the debate it has sparked.
Yes, it's an allegory related by Cyril Parkinson, originally in his lectures, and then eventually in his eponymous book. I'm familiar with it.
My question is: why is the subject of this thread "The Original Bike Shed Email", when there were undoubtedly lots of Bike Shed emails prior to October 1999?
Maybe there were, but I haven't found them. Maybe the title should be "The Earliest Bike Shed Email I've Seen". Also, it gives a pretty thorough explanation of the history behind it, something left out by most references I've seen.
Actually, I posted it because somebody linked it earlier today in a comment and it was the best (and earliest) explanation of the Bike Shed phenomena (in a software context) I'd seen.
I wish HN had this warning next to the "add comment" button. It would improve my posts.