The IKEA Effect on Software

For people who spend their lives dealing with perhaps the most objective thing, software engineers themselves tend to be very subjective, and emotional creatures. Anyone, that has ever had the pleasure of telling an engineer to destroy some of their code and start over, would know this. The “compliment sandwich” should be applied at minimum.

Why is that though? One would think dealing with such an objective machine some of the objectivity would rub off, and some would say it does, in everything apparently, but the code. I can’t say for sure, but I think this is due to the IKEA effect. The IKEA effect is one in a list of many cognitive biases, and it goes as follows

“The tendency for people to place a disproportionately high value on objects that they partially assembled themselves… regardless of the quality of the end result.”

Anyone that builds software, or has even seen people build software will know the effort that a team, or an individual has to put forth in order to come up with a good product. One would even go so far as to say the effort and mental load are far exceed that of assembling Ikea furniture. To make matters worse there are almost always no instructions, and if they do exist they’re just guidelines or fragments you have to then use to come up with the solution to your problem.

It makes me wonder how many millions are lost on developers feelings, and how many other professions might also suffer from a similar affliction. This could explain a lot of bad rap albums.