Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Ask HN: Are we overcomplicating software development?

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

121–130 of 378 posts

Re: Ask HN: Are we overcomplicating software development?

#121

Post by dcminter »

RandomOpinion wrote: post #92
reacharavindh wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Agile methods are also useful. If you can't plan 2 weeks of work you can probably not plan 6 months. Hmmm. I was just thinking the opposite yesterday. I'm a performance engineer working closely with two teams. One doing Agile and the other basing on wikis and Adhoc in-person whiteboard discussions. I find the non agile team more productive, efficient and dare I say happy. The Agile based team makes me sit in on the…

> I can visibly tell the devs walking out of the room spend more time worrying about "velocity" and "organisation of work" than the money making work that needs to be done. It almost feels like the agile process gives them "one more job" of picking the doable things from the list of stuff that needs to be done so they look better than their peers with better velocity. Classic symptom of managers using agile as a (mic…

I was once on a project where an "agile" team, at the behest of their managers, held a sprint "to improve velocity." I kid you not.

I will add that I was not on that team. Our scrum master, who was excellent, shielded us entirely from the management madness.

Re: Ask HN: Are we overcomplicating software development?

#123

Post by GnarfGnarf »

corysama wrote: post #27

One of my fav tech talks ever (and I watch a lot of tech talks) is Alan Kay's "Is it really 'complex'? Or, did we just make it 'complicated'?" It addresses your question directly, but at a very, very high level. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ubaX1Smg6pY Note that the laptop he is presenting on is not running Linux/Windows/OSX and that the presentation software he is using is not OoO/PowerPoint/Keynote. Instead, it is…

That is absurd. You can't write an OS in 100KLOC.

Re: Ask HN: Are we overcomplicating software development?

#124

Post by apercu »

PaulHoule wrote: post #9

Continuous integration is a good thing. Back in the bad old days you'd have three people working on parts of the system for 6 months and plan to snap them together in 2 weeks and it would take more like another 6 months. Agile methods are also useful. If you can't plan 2 weeks of work you can probably not plan 6 months. When agile methods harden into branded processes and where there is no consensus on the ground rul…

I think it's the nature of how a company implements agile, rather than agile itself. I have a client that subcontracts a lot of work to me (my work is mostly gathering business requirements and BPI).

They use "agile" but I have budget and timeline constraints on every project.

Re: Ask HN: Are we overcomplicating software development?

#125

Post by kosinus »

SatvikBeri wrote: post #63

Many of these practices are popularized by Google/Facebook/Amazon but don't make sense for a company with 100 or even 1,000 people. I try to focus on whether a practice will solve a concrete problem we're facing. Switching from Hadoop to Spark was clearly a good idea for our team, even though it required learning a new stack, but there isn't a strong reason to switch to Flink or start using Haskell. Agile makes sense…

One thing that bothers me is the 'relational databases are good enough' statement, that is repeated in other contexts as well.

But especially here, where we're talking about reducing complexity, it feels off to me. PostgreSQL and MySQL seem to me like incredibly complex packages. SQL, the language, is not easy to master either; most programmers I meet know mostly basics. On top of that, there's a long ongoing history of security malpractice.

When talking about reducing complexity, CouchDB and Redis are far easier alternatives, in my humble opinion, though they go slightly against 'use the tools developers know'.

Re: Ask HN: Are we overcomplicating software development?

#126

Post by greyman »

Continuous integration is also necessary for bigger projects with many inter-dependent parts. I worked in such a project, we had about 100 developers on it and I just can't imagine how it could be efficiently developed without CI. But for small projects it maybe isn't that critical.

Re: Ask HN: Are we overcomplicating software development?

#128

Post by swift »

I'd like to push back on continuous integration being over-complicated. It's easy to do using off-the-shelf software and it makes life a lot less stressful when you have confidence that your changes are good before landing them in production. It's such a win that I'd set it up even with a 10 person team.

Re: Ask HN: Are we overcomplicating software development?

#129

Post by AnimalMuppet »

makmanalp wrote: post #67

I think this is where a lot of varied work experience (small / large / old / new companies) is key, because it gives you perspective. You can then ask yourself, "why does this process suck so much, and why didn't it when I worked at X? In my experience, people who come from a monoculture background usually seem to not question dubious software, architecture and methodology choices that end up killing productivity and…

Yeah. If you're going to use languages, methodologies, and architectures without understanding, and without evaluating them for how well they fit your situation, many things will be painful. Don't follow the fads, whether methodologies (Agile), architecture (microservices), languages, or frameworks. Use what's appropriate for what you need to do.

Re: Ask HN: Are we overcomplicating software development?

#130

Post by [deleted] »

SatvikBeri wrote: post #63

Many of these practices are popularized by Google/Facebook/Amazon but don't make sense for a company with 100 or even 1,000 people. I try to focus on whether a practice will solve a concrete problem we're facing. Switching from Hadoop to Spark was clearly a good idea for our team, even though it required learning a new stack, but there isn't a strong reason to switch to Flink or start using Haskell. Agile makes sense…

[deleted]
Post reply on HN