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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?

#41
You definitely need to think through your requirements or you end up with this:

Asked to get some kind of analytics query to someone, and they need it fast and want it in some kind of visualization tool.

1. You open Zeppelin, take a bunch of database tables and whip out a query that is basically what they want and export it to an Elasticsearch + kibana instance.

Now comes the edge cases:

Oh I forgot, it needs to be on the internet

2. Need to set up a public IP, DNS, Nginx server and a series of rules to make it read-only (and it's still dangerous mind you)

Why isn't this password protected?

3. Add a nginx basic-auth with a single password

It needs to be available to admins and sales managers only.

4. Set up ngx_http_auth_request_module to hit the our authentication server (the cookies should be present - OHH the DNS name doesn't match the cookies. Set up a /subpath on the existing application.

It needs to work as an embedded view in the company's mobile app.

5. That uses tokens not cookies, so the auth-request module no longer works for this, need to come up with a SSO solution with a cookie and a place to store the cookie in a database. That requires a REST service on the existing app server, which will require a redeploy.

I just added a product to our system and it's not in Kibana

6. Need to modify the spark code to use spark streaming

The Spark server restarted and my new products aren't showing up!

7. Need to set up a service on the system to auto-start the spark job.

It is feasibly an actual product feature at this point, but (1) was asked for, but they really wanted 1 - 7. I would argue that (1) would only take 25% the time 2-7 takes to do. Not every product change is like that, obviously, but sometimes people think all changes are just so simple. Often it's the history and unstated features that make a huge difference.

Also this for fun: http://outofmymind.scanlen.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/Wh...

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

#43
post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Yes. Works quite well and can handle quite a bit of load. Some native support within Route 53 helps make setting it up easy.

http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonS3/latest/dev/WebsiteHostin...

http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonS3/latest/user-guide/static...

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

#44

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 fe…

I heard a story from an ex-wall-street engineer who related he was once asked to fix a message passing system so that it could now pass something like 10 x as many messages per second that before. He rewrote it and it now passed 1000 x messages / sec. He almost turned it in that way and then realized he was undercutting his future self. So he backed off the improvements to the required 10 x. Sure enough he got a big bonus and kudos for his work and a year later he was asked if he could pull another miracle out of his hat. Indeed he could. He sat on it for weeks, updated one line of code and then got another big bonus. LOL.

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

#46
post #37

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

Quite. And you tell the Windows admin at the other end, who doesn't know Python from the hole in his arse, that it's an option.

Remember - the server end is Windows, and the guys at that end didn't know what to do if it wasn't an .msi or .exe.

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

#47

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…

> Sometimes we overcomplicate the simplest shit. Indeed. Why not use nc and telnet on port 443 to test? Linux already has nc and Windows already has telnet.

The endpoint at their end was Windows. No nc. Apologies if that wasn't clear. I was testing our end reaching their endpoint at port 443.

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

#48
post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

once they see something that somewhat resembles the final product they get really impatient. (Especially for internal tool) Is it possible that what they've seen is, actually, good enough? Or at least, good enough to solve 90% of the problem while you fill in the missing piece that covers the rest.

Kind of. There are a few people who I don't mind using tools as soon as I have even a minimum functionality working. Then we have a few people who completely ignore any limitations I put of tools and use them in ways in which they are explicitly not working. Case-in-point: I created a process that automated a particular task. Said task bears a resemblance to another task, but there are a lot of edge cases in the othe…

Maybe it's a false economy to automate other processes if the political fallout from not automating hers is big?

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

#49

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…

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…

More likely he just didn't want to do it.
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