Hey everyone and welcome to Developer Team. My name is Jonathan Cottrell and in today's episode we're going to be talking about sunk costs. Specifically we're going to talk about the sunk cost fallacy and I'm going to give you three traps to avoid these traps lead to sunk cost fallacy moments. Today's episode is sponsored by Linode. Linode has been sponsoring us for a while now. Later on in today's episode we will talk a lot more about Linode but Linode is providing a $20 credit to Developer Team listeners. Of course you can find out more about that in the show notes but first I want to get straight into today's topic. We're going to talk about four things. First is what sunk cost actually is and then I'm going to tell you about three traps that you should avoid to avoid the sunk cost fallacy. So many of you have been asking me about the sunk cost fallacy and I'm going to tell you what the sunk cost is. The sunk cost is basically the idea that you have spent an X amount of money or time or energy on something so you might as well continue down that same path. So imagine that you buy a set of movie tickets and then you're deliberating over perhaps not going because you don't feel well and you convince yourself well I have already bought them so it would be a waste for me not to go. But the reality is that that is actually a sunk cost. Even if you don't go no one else is going to go and the money that you spent was spent already and your life quality is probably going to go down if you go out while you're not feeling well. That's not going to be an enjoyable experience for you and it's possible if you have something that's contagious you're going to get somebody else sick. So it's not a good idea for you to fall victim to that sunk cost fallacy in that moment that the idea being that you spent the money so you have some sort of obligation to follow through with the other end of that transaction. Now how does this apply to developers? Well we're going to talk about three traps that you can avoid as a developer to make sure that you aren't falling victim to the sunk cost fallacy. Now of course these are not comprehensive as with everything on the show you can continue this conversation with your peers and with other people around you what things may be sunk costs and what things may not be. For example it would not be true that if you have paid for 90% of a home or a car that suddenly you decide that you don't want to continue paying for it and you cite the sunk cost fallacy. Well that's actually not a great use of the of the citing of the fallacy because if you pay that extra 10% now you are the owner of the you have finalized your payments and you can do whatever you want with the car. There is extra incentive for you to finish those payments out. So you should be aware that the sunk cost fallacy does not apply to every single situation where you are spending time or money. But I want to jump straight into this first trap and then we'll talk about today's sponsor Linode and then we'll get back and talk about the other two traps. The first trap is when you're building out a feature especially one that a client or maybe a boss has asked for specifically but the user need for that feature has either been shown to be non-existent or relatively small. This happens all the time. We get part of the way through a feature and we find out that the that the client or perhaps the user no longer needs it. But because it was on our list of things to do we still fulfill that particular need. And part of the reason for this is because we don't feel good scrapping code that is well written. We don't feel good throwing away something that functions well. But the reality of this situation if you encounter it is that if that feature doesn't provide value then no matter how good the code is it doesn't really matter in the end. Right. It doesn't really help the goals of the customer. It doesn't help the goals of the user. And therefore that code that code is not really valuable to the product that you are building. So let's take a quick break and talk about today's sponsor Linode. Linode allows you to instantly deploy and manage an SSD server in the Linode cloud. You get a server running in seconds with your choice of Linux distribution resources and the location of the node. Now they have eight data centers. Their plans start at ten dollars a month. You can get a server running in just under a minute. They have hourly billing. There's a monthly cap on all of their plans all of their add-on services including backups node balancers and long view. You can have a VM up and running. You can run Docker containers. They have encrypted disks VPNs. You can run a private git server. And if you're looking for fast if your primary motivation is to find highly performance servers well Linode is a great option because they provide native SSD storage. They have a 40 gigabit network. That is incredibly fast. These these servers run on Intel E5 processors and beyond all of these things you can try out Linode and you can get a seven day money back guarantee. So go and check it out Linode.com. But of course Linode has provided a special offer for developer T listeners. If you use the code developer T20 at checkout and you can also use the special link in the show notes you will get a credit of twenty dollars added to your account automatically. And that's just for being a developer T listener. That's equivalent to two months for free. So go and check it out Linode.com. But of course check the show notes. Use the code developer T20 or the special link in the show notes which can be found at spec.fm. Thank you so much to Linode for sponsoring the show. Now let's get back into our discussion about the sunk cost fallacy. We may have a question. We may have a question. We may have a question. We may have a question. I mentioned the first trap to avoid is building a particular feature especially a feature that has been requested specifically by a client or a boss even though you found that the feature is no longer necessary or that it's no longer being demanded by the users. Another example is continuing to invest time learning a platform or a language even if you don't want or need to learn it simply because you've studied a significant portion of it already. And you know enough to be functional in that language. So this happens to people all the time. We think that just because we know a little bit of Ruby that the most likely thing that we should learn next would be Rails or Sinatra. Right. We think that just because we know JavaScript that we should also learn how to use Node. And that's not necessarily true unless you know for sure that you want to or you need to learn a particular feature. So let's get back to the show notes. So let's get back to the show notes. So let's get back to the show notes. So let's get back to the show notes. So let's get back to the show notes. So let's get back to the show notes. So let's get back to the show notes. So let's get back to the show notes. So let's get back to the show notes. So let's get back to the show notes. So let's get back to the show notes. So let's get back to the show notes. So let's get back to the show notes. So let's get back to the show notes. So let's get back to the show notes. So let's get back to the show notes. So let's get back to the show notes. So let's get back to the show notes. So let's get back to the show notes. So let's get back to the show notes. So let's get back to the show notes. So let's get back to the show notes. So let's get back to the show notes. So let's get back to the show notes. So let's get back to the show notes. So let's get back to the show notes. So let's get back to the show notes.