Is it difficult for a programmer to resist “feature creep”?

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No. That’s a problem reserved for the people running the business.

Business guys (i.e. anybody non-technical with authority over programmers) make their living by telling other people to make things. Programmers are the little cave gnomes that live in the basement making Artifacts of Incredible Value and Beauty, living a good life, but not as good as the guys that sell those things.

gnome discovering the meaning of social networking. As you can see, it’s taking awhile.

The gnomes are intimately familiar with the Artifacts of Incredible Value and Beauty and know with careful precision how they work and what they do. They’ve decided that life on the surface, with all the other people, sucks beyond all belief, and so they have made the considered decision to live in close proximity to the Artifacts of Incredible Value and Beauty and to understand their secrets.

But the business guys, knowing nothing of the hallowed Artifacts, only of their sale and seductive qualities, think that adding more and more seductive qualities to Artifacts of Incredible Value and Beauty will allow them to sell them for more and more Glittering Gold Coin, which is of way more value to the business guys than Artifacts of Incredible Value and Beauty.

The gnomes making the Artifacts, knowing precisely how they operate and the nature of their seductive features, often try to impress upon the business guys that no, this particular seductive quality won’t work well with these other seductive qualities that we already built in.

And sometimes they don’t. The gnomes are way more seduced by the Artifacts than the people who buy them, they gave their lives to those Artifacts, after all. So sometimes they fail to mount a spirited defense against the business guys. The gnomes can’t live without the business guys after all, the business guys provide a giant, glittering cave for the gnomes to build the Artifacts in, and the gnomes get to really like that cave.

But never does a gnome, who is intimately familiar with Artifacts of Incredible Value and Beauty, think to add something that is ugly and base and stupid to their hallowed Artifacts.

Now, there’s a special breed of gnome, the kind that wanders out of his cave and wants to live the life of a bourgeois business guy. These heathens are more susceptible than even the rubes. Because these are gnomes that don’t want to just be close to divinity. They want to possess it. They want to enter into the realm of demigods like Mark Zuckerberg, and win that glory.

A few of them make it.

Most of them are crushed.