Intentional Technical Debt

This goes along with the entry I wrote called A Big Ball of Mud. Often when you work for someone else, even though you're the pattern maker, you don't get to decide how to do things. Some decisions are taken out of your hands for whatever reason. Here's an example that annoyed me way back when.

This coat (#72558) was a unisex wool bomber type jacket. The point of contention being "unisex". In my opinion, there is rarely such thing. What "unisex" must mean by default is "sized for men" but with the implication that "we're optimizing our chances by saying women can wear it too". That's the reality. Were it not and sized for women, it wouldn't be called unisex because few men could wear it. In the photo above, you can see the woman's sleeves are much too long and the neck way too large. In this case, the technical debt of this jacket was incurred by a purchasing decision. In this plant, they only wanted to buy three sizes of separating zippers. No lie.