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I wrote the SQL query in 5 mins. Why does my engineer say it will take a month?

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Re: I wrote the SQL query in 5 mins. Why does my engineer say it will take a month?

#31

Post by JustSomeNobody »

dsp1234 wrote: post #22
mcbruiser3 wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

seems often developers tend to over engineer or focus on edge cases that inflate costs, and not given enough attention to ROI

Conversation from two days ago: manager: Why did you allow this thing to happen. me: It was an edge case that I pointed out 7 months ago. I've put it on the backlog 3 times, and you've removed it each time citing that it's an edge case that would never happen, and other newer features needed to be implemented. manager: That's an engineer's response. Just fix it! me: welp, shrug

This is so not uncommon. :)

Re: I wrote the SQL query in 5 mins. Why does my engineer say it will take a month?

#32

Post by [deleted] »

Declanomous wrote: post #14

> Nothing ever works as soon as an engineer writes code; it is an iterative process. One of my complaints about working in an environment where I am the only person who can program is that nobody else understands this. I've taken the time to explain this point to people, and they seem to grasp it fairly well, but once they see something that somewhat resembles the final product they get really impatient. The last 25%…

[deleted]

Re: I wrote the SQL query in 5 mins. Why does my engineer say it will take a month?

#33

Post by defined »

dsp1234 wrote: post #22
mcbruiser3 wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

seems often developers tend to over engineer or focus on edge cases that inflate costs, and not given enough attention to ROI

Conversation from two days ago: manager: Why did you allow this thing to happen. me: It was an edge case that I pointed out 7 months ago. I've put it on the backlog 3 times, and you've removed it each time citing that it's an edge case that would never happen, and other newer features needed to be implemented. manager: That's an engineer's response. Just fix it! me: welp, shrug

> manager: That's an engineer's response. Just fix it!

Translation: I didn't actually require any answer other than "I am sorry, sir/ma'am, it will never happen again." Facts are irrelevant. I may not always be right, but I am never wrong, code monkey.

Re: I wrote the SQL query in 5 mins. Why does my engineer say it will take a month?

#34

Post by hysan »

mcbruiser3 wrote: post #15
mistermann wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly, this is the substantial other side of the argument that almost always seems to be left out of the discussion. "Good enough, done in a week" is a perfectly viable option that is rarely offered by timesheet-padding developers.

seems often developers tend to over engineer or focus on edge cases that inflate costs, and not given enough attention to ROI

> and not given enough attention to ROI

Which itself could be a result of management often viewing engineering as a cost center with no perceivable ROI. This can be reflected in pay not being commensurate with company performance and not stacking up to other employees (sales, management, etc.) and gives the engineers no reason to pay attention to ROI in their decisions. I would bet that in companies where engineering is very much involved with cost, ROI, and paid based on how those numbers turn out, the engineers would focus less on edge cases and know when to draw the line.

Re: I wrote the SQL query in 5 mins. Why does my engineer say it will take a month?

#35

Post by hermitdev »

cnnsucks wrote: post #20

Because your "5 minutes" is pure bullshit and your engineer knows it. Your engineer knows that if she writes your "5 minute" query without careful analysis, peer review and documentation and the query ever produces a questionable result --- whether it was anticipated by your requirements or not --- it's your engineers ass; you'll throw your engineer under the bus _instantly_. Your engineer knows that if she writes yo…

I had a veteran DBA close to retirement (she was my cube-mate) warn me about this when I was an intern. I had a very simple request come in to update some data. Didn't even take 5 minutes. She told me: never do the simple tasks immediately. Sit on them for a bit. Business users don't understand complexity of different tasks and think they should all take the same amount of effort. So, if you do one thing in just a few minutes, they'll expect everything to take the same amount of time. In my experience, it's proved to be true.

Re: I wrote the SQL query in 5 mins. Why does my engineer say it will take a month?

#36

Post by sbov »

Declanomous wrote: post #14

> Nothing ever works as soon as an engineer writes code; it is an iterative process. One of my complaints about working in an environment where I am the only person who can program is that nobody else understands this. I've taken the time to explain this point to people, and they seem to grasp it fairly well, but once they see something that somewhat resembles the final product they get really impatient. The last 25%…

Yes, edge cases can make features pathological. That "simple feature X" might be simple in isolation but when crossed with "simple feature Y" may cause your edge cases, test code, and linecount, to explode. Not all features are a simple additive amount of work. Usually the work to add a feature is relative to the other features that already exist within the system.

Re: I wrote the SQL query in 5 mins. Why does my engineer say it will take a month?

#37

Post by reledi »

sofaofthedamned wrote: post #6

Had a similar thing a while ago. Very complicated IPSEC tunnels, routers switches firewalls and whatnot between us and our customer. Customers techs were - not great - so needed to make sure port 443 worked through the tunnel. Our side mainly Linux, theirs was mainly Windows 10. Asked a programmer our side (.net) who said it'd take a couple of hours to write a simple webserver, package it up into an .msi and give it…

    python -m SimpleHTTPServer 443

Re: I wrote the SQL query in 5 mins. Why does my engineer say it will take a month?

#38

Post by dragonwriter »

mistermann wrote: post #7
unethical_ban wrote: post #5

On the flip side, when something DOESN'T need HA, sub-millisecond query response time, or lynx and IE Edge compatability, people need to know when "good enough" is good enough. On my ops team, we've gotten some flak for not building robust enough of a request queue for some tasks. But it's been down several hours in the past year. The server almost never needs maintenance. None of the workload is real-time. App resta…

Exactly, this is the substantial other side of the argument that almost always seems to be left out of the discussion. "Good enough, done in a week" is a perfectly viable option that is rarely offered by timesheet-padding developers.

> "Good enough, done in a week" is a perfectly viable option that is rarely offered by timesheet-padding developers.

I see it all the time from timesheet-padding developers who also are in a position that they'll benefit from the higher long-term support costs that that approach generates.

It's just a matter of whether they want to pad timesheets in the short term or the long term.

Re: I wrote the SQL query in 5 mins. Why does my engineer say it will take a month?

#39

Post by WrtCdEvrydy »

mabbo wrote: post #24
arethuza wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I once had an infrastructure guy who worked in the same company quote me £70K for new hardware to host a single static HTML web page. £70K of new hardware! I stuck it on an existing server and nobody noticed though I might have got into trouble with the Change Prevention Board for not using the right form or something... Edit: He did have a carefully worked out explanation of where the money had to be spent.... which…

Tsk, poor choice on your part. You should have started a side consultancy (get a spouse to own it maybe?) and say that you can do it for a mere £40K. Then dump the static file on S3, and let the interest from the £40K in your bank account pay for it.

Okay, that sounds pretty cool. S3 can host static HTML files?

Re: I wrote the SQL query in 5 mins. Why does my engineer say it will take a month?

#40

Post by kls »

mcbruiser3 wrote: post #15
mistermann wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly, this is the substantial other side of the argument that almost always seems to be left out of the discussion. "Good enough, done in a week" is a perfectly viable option that is rarely offered by timesheet-padding developers.

seems often developers tend to over engineer or focus on edge cases that inflate costs, and not given enough attention to ROI

Guess who's ass gets chewed when the system craps out in the middle of the night, when Asia your emerging market is just coming on line?

Funny this story reminded me of a recent event where my team was working on some reg-ex expressions for a language processor. Not overly complex stuff but not simple by any definition (they had been working on the set for 2 days), they had a side line manager from another department, that knew enough to be dangerous, so he decides he is going to run in his office and whip up some reg-ex, after reading the docs. So we threw it in the test cases, after tons of failures he got the picture that edge cases count, as he got a good visualization of how multiple edge cases increase the the odds of failure by orders or magnitude.

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