“This project will only take 2 hours” • Hacker News Board

Re: “This project will only take 2 hours”

#261

Post by mtwittman » Wed, Nov 10, 2021, 5:35 PM UTC

tcmart14 wrote: post #126

jiggawatts wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I vaguely remember a rant some famous Linux developer went on about how setting up printing in Linux requires a dozen parameters, half of which are arcane nonsense that the printer manufacturer themselves probably doesn't know how to set up correctly. Meanwhile, on an Apple or Windows computer it can be literally just plug and print. The difference is that hiding those arcane input parameters takes work , and a lot o…

I have not experience this fool-proof plug and play on windows or mac os. I just last year replaced a printer because it wasn't working with my wife's Macbook Pro, it worked one day and just dropped of the face of the earth the next (was able to print over USB from my linux laptop still). The printers were I work constantly have issues working with the windows PCs. Moral of the story, printers are a necessary evil an…

The single most problem-reducing maneuver I've tried with home network printers is getting the printer off plain DHCP and make it consistent (set a static IP manually [outside your DHCP range] or by DHCP reservation).

After sorting this out in the router, then add the printer to the various desktops/laptops/tablets/phones.

Maybe I'm imagining the improvement, but I don't think so (and it can't hurt).

Re: “This project will only take 2 hours”

#262

Post by JoshuaDavid » Wed, Nov 10, 2021, 5:53 PM UTC

toyg wrote: post #112

Jensson wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This was supposed to be a student hobby project, not a company product release. You are thinking of this problem from the perspective of an enterprise programmer, not of a hobbyist enthusiast.

The opposite is actually true. The enterprise programmer thinks nothing of deploying some J2EE monstrosity with "simple" setup scripts and "just change this Windows parameter in registry" and "run this command to create a service to start and stop from Services.msc". That's what they live and breath, that's the bar they are happy to clear. The hobbyist enthusiast, on the other hand, will only have knowledge of actual…

> So development practices get harder and harder for no real reason.

I think it's even worse than that. I think that any time there is a widely adopted platform which is easy to customize without requiring any significant level of skill, there is some subset of people which churns out very simple tools to do popular things well enough, and stuffs those tools with adware / malware / spyware to make money. The platform vendor responds to this flood of crapware by adding new checks and processes to ensure software quality and security, and keeps doing so as long as quality and security is a problem. At a certain point, the platform in question is no longer the easiest target, and the people creating the crapware switch to the next platform, and the formerly-easy-to-deploy-to platform is now a complicated mess to write anything for.

Re: “This project will only take 2 hours”

#263

Post by real-dino » Wed, Nov 10, 2021, 6:58 PM UTC

vmception wrote: post #242

real-dino wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You have to lie about take-home assignments. That is the accepted way. I had a take home test that was to last 2 hours, and so I promised myself I would spend no longer on it. I provided a complete log of what I did minute by minute for a take home test for the last test I did as a defensive measure... There was no break, no pondering, this was flat out knowing exactly what needed to be done and just typing constantl…

The folly is that if you did upload to github, they would have wanted to see steady commit history as well, which would have given away how much time you actually worked on it. The key is lying because you already had a similar code base to use, most likely from interviewing so much you'd seen it before.

I actually didn't get a job for over-commiting. I hit a point where things were working, and wanted to be able to git-diff in VS Code, and they declined my application due to that.

I was going to push as well, as I wanted to make sure that was set up right, but they associated that with 'pushing untested code to production'

Re: “This project will only take 2 hours”

#264

Post by hinkley » Wed, Nov 10, 2021, 7:03 PM UTC

commandlinefan wrote: post #203

hinkley wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's an old saying that you can tell developer maturity by the units of time they use for estimating code. Only brand-new developers (and Sith?) estimate things in hours. Experienced devs estimate in days, but senior developers won't give you a number in increments smaller than weeks. Also, any manager who trusts an estimate from a new employee or especially a new developer is an ass. They should have known better…

> They should have known better In most of these cases, I actually suspect malice over ignorance. They figure they can squeeze some unpaid overtime out of an unsuspecting junior by pressuring them to "commit" to an unreasonable deadline and then trying to hold them to it.

I had a shocking realization one day that the incompetent PO I was dealing with had not bumbled his way into that position but been placed there on purpose by his manager.

There are certain brands of incompetence that get results, and you don't have to be the one that is aware of that fact to reap the rewards of manipulating people in that way.

Re: “This project will only take 2 hours”

#265

Post by kenbolton » Wed, Nov 10, 2021, 7:04 PM UTC

jiggawatts wrote: post #78

ajsnigrutin wrote: post #72

I've gone down this rabbitole before, and yes, there are things that take two hours, and there are things that take a lot more. The problem is the scope - ie. are you trying to do what you said you'll do (miniature software to log urls), or are you adding 100s of requirements to the scope (gui, filters, privacy,...). We had a bunch of .xml files containing some data, and someone wanted a .csv file... sure, an hour ma…

I vaguely remember a rant some famous Linux developer went on about how setting up printing in Linux requires a dozen parameters, half of which are arcane nonsense that the printer manufacturer themselves probably doesn't know how to set up correctly. Meanwhile, on an Apple or Windows computer it can be literally just plug and print. The difference is that hiding those arcane input parameters takes work , and a lot o…

> I face this all the time at work. "Can't you just make a single button to run this task so I don't have to figure out how to use this complicated script?"

"Just" is a four-letter word and its use is forbidden. Replace it with "in addition" and change how everyone thinks about the request.

Re: “This project will only take 2 hours”

#266

Post by fragmede » Wed, Nov 10, 2021, 7:11 PM UTC

PragmaticPulp wrote: post #12

Jensson wrote: post #9

> A few students came to me asking if I had any ideas for a software project that they could work on outside of class. > I explained an idea for a utility that I had been wanting: A desktop program that monitors my clipboard for URLs and logs them automatically. I think this person misunderstood the students, the student wanted a project to practice programming, not a project to practice project management. The progr…

> The programming parts of this would take 2-4 hours This is, literally, the error that the entire article works on dispelling. Anyone can write a rough command line tool that monitors the clipboard and prints to stdout. Writing a usable GUI application is a lot more work. That’s not project management, that’s coding work. The ratio of project management work to coding isn’t 10:1 or even 100:1 like you’re suggesting.

A GUI this simple is that hard. Not compared to learning some of the foibles of CLI programming. What the hell is a stderr and why is >| giving me an error? Reading man pages is a skill unto itself. For those raised on Windows with Visual Studio (not VSCode, but OG Visual Studio), the utility's GUI is quick and easy. Definitely within the 4 hours window if you yolo design a GUI. A button for enable/disable, and a config option for which file to dump the URLs to. How each student decides the UX for the GUI should be is up to them, but that's flexibility in the assignment at the university level, and shouldn't be a profession experience in project management.

Re: “This project will only take 2 hours”

#267

Post by vmception » Wed, Nov 10, 2021, 7:14 PM UTC

real-dino wrote: post #263

vmception wrote: post #242

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The folly is that if you did upload to github, they would have wanted to see steady commit history as well, which would have given away how much time you actually worked on it. The key is lying because you already had a similar code base to use, most likely from interviewing so much you'd seen it before.

I actually didn't get a job for over-commiting. I hit a point where things were working, and wanted to be able to git-diff in VS Code, and they declined my application due to that. I was going to push as well, as I wanted to make sure that was set up right, but they associated that with 'pushing untested code to production'

yeah its completely arbitrary and they don't tell you what they are going to be scoring by

but then they pretend its a meritocracy

Re: “This project will only take 2 hours”

#268

Post by marcellus23 » Wed, Nov 10, 2021, 11:37 PM UTC

dkdbejwi383 wrote: post #91

marcellus23 wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So? In any decent programming environment, checking if a string is a URL is a one liner

Not without false-positives. E.g., is "foo.bar" a URL? Maybe. But it could also be a filename. How do you know if it's a "real" URL or not?

I don't have to worry about that, because I'll pick a language that offers a `URL` object or something similar, and which handles the validation for me.

Additionally, if foo.bar were a valid URL, then I would expect it to appear on the list. I can't read the user's mind as to whether the text should be treated as a URL or not.

Re: “This project will only take 2 hours”

#269

Post by scollet » Wed, Nov 10, 2021, 11:52 PM UTC

Jensson wrote: post #63

kaishiro wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sounds like a good way to ensure your juniors never grow.

Why wouldn't they grow? Once a junior has good technical skills they can start worrying about user concerns and therefore grow in other areas. I see no reason why this would limit them in any way.

I agree with you with a tangential perspective.

I think any non-trivial task is going to surface technical limitations which might feed back into the stakeholder decision making process.

A junior might be alienated if they are outside that process, but if they approach it with a problem-solving mindset they'll likely have a more intimate knowledge of the closed loop.

Re: “This project will only take 2 hours”

#270

Post by Anthony-G » Wed, Nov 10, 2021, 11:53 PM UTC

real-dino wrote: post #181

ThalesX wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder if that's why I wasn't a good fit for a recent company I interviewed with using a take-home assignment... bear in mind it's been at least a decade since I last took a take-home, so things might have changed. I received the task on Friday evening, I spent the week-end thinking about the problem. Monday I had actual work and on Tuesday, I spent a day coming up with a shit implementation. Then, I started improv…

You have to lie about take-home assignments. That is the accepted way. I had a take home test that was to last 2 hours, and so I promised myself I would spend no longer on it. I provided a complete log of what I did minute by minute for a take home test for the last test I did as a defensive measure... There was no break, no pondering, this was flat out knowing exactly what needed to be done and just typing constantl…

That's seriously impressive work – though it occurs to me that you didn’t account for all the time spent thinking about what you were going to do in the two hours. And the feed-back is hilariously bad.

I’ve often wished I’d focussed more on coding over system administration but reading accounts like this makes me happier about my recent career choices.