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

wtfismyengineertalkingabout.com

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

#91

Post by paulddraper »

taneq wrote: post #78
still_grokking wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>The server almost never needs maintenance. None of the workload is real-time. App restarts are acceptable if memory leaks occur. Ah! Classic duct tape programming! Something like this is fine as long as the requirements don't change. But we all know that at a point the requirements will change. And then you have to tell your customer that the "little new requirement" can't be accomplished with a cheap little change…

The "new little requirement" which you couldn't have anticipated is probably no easier accommodated by your Hadoop cluster with GPU processing stack than it would be by a PHP script on a VM.

Probably harder, I dare say.

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

#92

Post by paulddraper »

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%…

I think it's the 80/80 rule of software development.

The first 80% takes 80% of the time. The last 20% takes the remaining 80%.

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

#93

Post by grogenaut »

s73ver wrote: post #69
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

Developers are also the ones that get yelled at, called on the weekends, and even fired if those cases happen. If you're willing to come in on the weekend to fix your query, be my guest. But I like being able to spend my weekend relaxing.

Huh, where I work the managers are the ones who get fired for bad ops or oversights. The engineers are just penalized by dealing with shitty decisions so they dream about quitting. The smart ones just fulton out of shitty managers to good teams.

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

#95

Post by salesguy222 »

grogenaut wrote: post #93
s73ver wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Developers are also the ones that get yelled at, called on the weekends, and even fired if those cases happen. If you're willing to come in on the weekend to fix your query, be my guest. But I like being able to spend my weekend relaxing.

Huh, where I work the managers are the ones who get fired for bad ops or oversights. The engineers are just penalized by dealing with shitty decisions so they dream about quitting. The smart ones just fulton out of shitty managers to good teams.

You most likely work for a company that hasn't yet been overrun by the corporate world's version of "career politicians" who are there to leech a paycheck at all costs.

They often blame others while finding very sneaky and specific ways to, despite all odds, rise to a relatively insulated level without any modicum of technical or managerial prowess

congrats!!!

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

#96

Post by retox »

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…

You asked a .Net dev for a solution and he specced you one...

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

#97

Post by manigandham »

WhitneyLand wrote: post #76
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.

What experience has led you to make a comment that is insulting and I'm guessing, without foundation, that there exists a phenomenon whereby developers request more time than is actually needed to complete a project?

What? Do you think every single developer is some noble professional only focused on the project?

15 years with software dev experience and every single dev team at midsize and larger companies has always asked for far more time than necessary. Same with almost all enterprise consultants.

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

#98

Post by projektir »

Pxtl wrote: post #66
Luuseens wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, I host my blog that way: - Generate static files using Pelican - Dump the files to S3 - Set up Route53 to point a domain at the bucket - Set up CloudFront (Amazon's CDN) to sit in front of the S3 bucket, since I found pure S3 to be too slow Works incredibly well.

Why use Amazon for static pages? My github page works just fine.

I believe Amazon is more robust if your website gets hit by a lot of traffic.

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

#99

Post by WhitneyLand »

manigandham wrote: post #97
WhitneyLand wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What experience has led you to make a comment that is insulting and I'm guessing, without foundation, that there exists a phenomenon whereby developers request more time than is actually needed to complete a project?

What? Do you think every single developer is some noble professional only focused on the project? 15 years with software dev experience and every single dev team at midsize and larger companies has always asked for far more time than necessary. Same with almost all enterprise consultants.

How do you know it was more time than necessary? Did you give them the time they asked for and notice at the end of the project people were sitting around bored?

Or did you not give them the time they asked for and declare yourself correct after squeezing in a deadline? And if so how do you know what corners were cut or what technical debt was accrued to make a deadline the team did not sign off on?

Whether every single person is noble is irrelevant. People are making broad generalizations here against the reputation of developers with what I see to be weak and anecdotal evidence.

If someone has made serious inquiry into the subject and controlled for complexities like I suggested above then by all means let the chips where they may.

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

#100

Post by mancerayder »

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…

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 restarts are acceptable if memory leaks occur.

If we did everything by the enterprise book, we'd still be 70% of the way to a deployed product, instead of 15 months into its completion.

Sure. Except if this Ops team is like most Ops teams, they'd prefer to do it the (cue dark, brooding orchestral dum-dum-dum musical interlude) 'enterprise' way rather than be woken up by PagerDuty in the middle of the night because a new release push lead to the CPU spiking.

Sorry, but I've almost never seen situations where people have skimped on HA and someone else didn't get excoriated during an outage.

Maybe other people's experiences are different, but as a DevOps guy, even in a relatively new environment, my priority is stability. Not faith-based-computing based on someone's positive seat-of-their-pants past experience.

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