> I wonder how you’d feel if you as a developer were told that every line of code you wanted to change — even those with obvious bugs — could not be touched unless you had previously demonstrated why you expect a measurable benefit to the satisfaction of the business development staff, and that your commit access was going to be revoked and every change would have to be made by bizdev after someone who didn’t know anything about programming decided whether it was justified.
The difference being that the developer makings his own changes as he sees the problem, not asking someone else to make the changes, whereas the designer just asks someone else to make an arbitrary change. If the developer is asking someone else to make a few lines of changes, he better gives a good justification.
So a developer is permitted to make arbitrary changes to the design at his whim with no justification, because he/she is doing the actual work. Because design is not actual work? But the designer, with years of experience, research, university studies and so on, cannot request to reverse that arbitrary change?
I mean, it's division of roles. does the developer want to be a designer too? Does the developer want to justify their choice of algorithms to the designer?
Doesn't this seem one sided to expect the designer to justify every choice, but the developer answers to no-one?
The point is when you ask someone else to do the work for you, you need to give more justification than you are doing it yourself because in software development pretty much everyone has their plate full or overflowed, and your adding of more work on them would need to be prioritized against pushing something else off. Of course you need to justify your change that is important enough to push off some of other work.
If you are doing the change in HTML/CSS/Javascript or whatever yourself, go right ahead. Just make sure you don't break something else.
Likewise if there's change the developer is asking the designer to make, the developer better makes a good case for it. What if I tell you to remove the color red and blue in your design. Just do it. Don't ask why. You would be annoyed, too. And when you question, I told you, oh well, based on my years of training and experience, color red and blue run slowly in this algorithm.
I think what annoys most people here is that the designer thinks his changes are the most important ones and have to be made. There are millions other things the engineers need to worry about to make the product work. If the database is corrupting, moving 3 pixels to the left is not important. What the engineers asking is the justification for the change so that it can be weighed against other priorities. Isn't that so hard to do?
The difference being that the developer makings his own changes as he sees the problem, not asking someone else to make the changes, whereas the designer just asks someone else to make an arbitrary change. If the developer is asking someone else to make a few lines of changes, he better gives a good justification.