The Miller Principle

16

I made this up years ago but it holds today as much as ever:

The Miller Principle: No one reads anything.

This principle applies to the following:

  • User documentation
  • Specifications
  • Code comments
  • Any text on a user interface
  • Any email longer than one line

I had some other principles too but I figured no one would read them…. :)

Comments

16 Responses to “The Miller Principle”
  1. Mike Kaufman says:

    Wonderful ! But I know I read lots of docs/specs at least (and usually groan about how incomplete and ambiguous they are). You clearly do too. So maybe it should be “No one ELSE reads anything”…

  2. Jay Meyer says:

    good observation. When being whipped by business to make it cheap and fast, we don’t have time to do it well. Words make the software neither cheaper nor reach the deadline faster, so who needs them?

  3. M Easter says:

    I would add: code comments and any email longer than one line!

    ;-)

  4. Bob says:

    Nice principle but do you have any examples of things this principle might apply to?

    You should write some more principles too!

  5. Alex says:

    I can only assume these comments were really funny as I didn’t really get around to reading them.

  6. I think this is only true with poorly written things. I’ve written specs that were not only read, but remembered years later and requested for specific content.

    You just have to do a good job writing it.

  7. Alex says:

    @Erik: Actually, I think it’s fairly pervasive even for well written documents. But of course, good writing is more likely to be read.

  8. Yep. And never ask more than one question in an email, too. Only one will be answered.

  9. dave says:

    What is the miller principle ?

  10. Kishore Senji says:

    The last two entries are funny and sadly true more often than not.

  11. Nathan says:

    hi i enjoyed the read

  12. Alex dP says:

    According to Steve McConnell’s excellent book “Code Complete”, good code equals readable code. So, good code doesn’t need comments anymore. By the way, code is not all. So, I don’t agree with you on some points. If many consultants are paid by the massive paper weight they produce, in the other hand, effective documentation exists. It just needs to be well distilled with a constant goal : communicate only the good information.

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  1. [...] I only made it through the first sentence of The Miller Principle before I stopped reading. I can only guess what he’s talking about…whatever it is, it’s probably good. [...]

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  3. [...] Personally, I’m not willing to go quite this far, but I appreciate the sentiment. It certainly resonates well with the Miller Principle. [...]



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