Product people swear by the old, hacker-code-worthy if it’s stupid and works, it’s not stupid thing. Even today.
And this has to stop.
Lousy, lazy, lame and vain product people are misusing it to harm their companies, their products and ultimately, the user experience.
The whole thing has to be retired.
There’s only one place where the adage works.
When there are no solutions that work and people are desperately looking for one, a hack does wonders even if it’s stupid to look at and use.
Think about this. For many years, Hootsuite featured one of the crappiest UIs but it was killing it in social media management. It was a stupid design but it worked. Why? Because there was no really good/better alternative that was as popularly known.
Buffer did not have a bulk-schedule feature, so people made use of a hack-around plugin that was all about excel sheets and add-ons. Not exactly stupid but you get the point.
These were unique cases. Where the solution doesn’t exist, a stupid solution is okay. (Caveat: till someone shows up with a smarter solution)
But to use the adage as a justification for laziness or because one is in a hurry or one does not want to think deeper and come up with better solutions is downright blasphemous.
This coder I know uses it many times throughout a project. And for what? For UI problems that he is too lazy to solve.
A product manager leans on this stupid adage because product managers are always in a hurry to push out an update. The resultant is half-assed, not surprisingly.
I know criticism is easy. Living right in the midst of such decisions and such irresponsible usage of the adage takes its toll.
These people butcher through carefully-designed elements, walk all over a well-thought-out process and pay almost no attention to the important little details that matter (instead, spend time talking about crap).
And then, when someone points out the flaws — blatant and apparent as they are — they say, “if it’s stupid and it works, it’s not stupid.”