The Traveling Consultant Problem

He argues that the worst software shops are the ones that call in traveling consultants, so their experience is naturally shaped by crisis and broken codebases. From that sample, it is easy to conclude that a framework is flawed, even when the real issue is misuse.

He compares this to diagnosing a nation by only seeing sick people. The same bias affects drug policy, where focusing only on bad outcomes hides other effects. His own stance is to build simple, sharp tools, accept that they can cut careless users, and expect Rails users to care about craft and good code.

Reading notes

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• Traveling consultants usually arrive when a team is already in crisis and the code base is a mess.
• Judging Rails from those cases produces a distorted view because the sample is made of broken projects.
• Sharp tools can increase productivity and still carry real risk, as with Ruby’s monkey patching.
• Rails is meant for people who want to improve their craft and write beautiful code, not to rescue people who do not care about quality.