Alright, let’s talk about this whole “large boobies” thing. Not in the way you might be thinking, scrolling through the internet late at night. Nah, I’m talking about those projects, those features, those… things… that are just so big, so in-your-face, that everyone gawks at them, but they end up being more trouble than they’re worth. That was my practice, my experience, with a project that was absolutely dominated by a couple of these… let’s just call them ‘showstoppers’ for politeness, shall we?
So, I jumped onto this gig, pretty standard stuff, or so I thought. The buzz was all about these two massive, flashy features. Management paraded them around like prize-winning poodles. “Innovation!” they called it. “Game-changer!” they crowed. To me, looking at the specs and the early prototypes, they looked like, well, like ‘large boobies’ – impressive from a distance, maybe, but practically speaking? A nightmare waiting to happen. They were complex, poorly thought-out in terms of integration with everything else, and sucked up resources like a black hole.
My job started with trying to build around these monsters. Trying to make my sensible, bread-and-butter modules work when they were constantly overshadowed or outright broken by updates to these ‘showstoppers.’ It was like trying to build a solid house on top of a couple of giant, wobbly jelly molds. We’d spend days, weeks even, just trying to stabilize things after one of the ‘boobies’ got a new coat of paint or a new jiggle physics update, metaphorically speaking, of course. The core functionality? The stuff users actually needed? That got pushed to the back burner, again and again.
I remember one team meeting, we were all there, looking at the burn-down charts, which were more like burn-sideways charts at that point. I piped up, “Look, these centerpiece features, they’re killing us. They’re not stable, they’re breaking other components, and they’re eating all our time.” You could have heard a pin drop. Then the project lead, bless his cotton socks, just smiled weakly and said, “But they look so good in the demos!” That was the moment I knew this was going to be one of those projects.
We crunched. Oh boy, did we crunch. Not to deliver value, mind you. We crunched to make the ‘large boobies’ look good for the next stakeholder presentation. Patching holes, hardcoding stuff, special demo modes… the whole nine yards. It was a complete sham. All the effort went into propping up these distracting, oversized elements while the actual foundation crumbled beneath.
And the end result? Predictable. The product launched with a huge fanfare, focused entirely on these two ‘amazing’ features. They looked stunning for the first five minutes. Then people tried to actually use the damn thing for their day-to-day work. Turns out, a pretty face doesn’t make up for a broken core. The ‘large boobies’ were buggy, resource-hungry, and often got in the way of what users genuinely wanted to do. The rest of the system? Underdeveloped, rushed, and full of its own problems because no one had any time left for it.
So, what did I learn from that whole practice, that whole ordeal? It’s pretty simple, really. Don’t get bedazzled by the ‘large boobies.’ The flashy, attention-grabbing stuff that doesn’t actually serve a purpose or isn’t built on a solid foundation is just a distraction. It’s a trap. Focus on the real substance, the stuff that works, the stuff that matters to the people actually using your product. Sounds like common sense, right? But you’d be surprised how often common sense gets thrown out the window when something big and shiny comes along. That’s my record, my takeaway. Seen it happen more than once, unfortunately, but that one project was the absolute poster child for it.
