31–40 of 511 posts
this is definitely one of the advice i give to senior dev i work with: if you're proud of how smart your solution is, there's a high chance you overengineered and made a mess of a simple problem. i now take great pride when my code looks boringly obvious.
The author hits the nail on the head with his claim that imaginary problems are more fun than real ones. As developers and smart folks in general, we like complicated problems that are big and far away. How many times have I heard in a meeting, "Yeah, but when we have 1M users..." It's great fun to think your product will get to 1M users. It's also very unlikely. It's not nearly as fun to finish and ship and market a…
Reminds me of a PM I used to work with. "Will this work for 1000 simultaneous users?" After almost 2 months, we have less than 100 users total, maybe 5 of them log in a day, and maybe 1 will actually do anything of interest. There is no technical problem. The problem is nobody worked on actually marketing the product. Build it and nobody shows up is the norm.
We never saw anywhere near those numbers in production, but I don’t really blame them - it was a big company and you do what you can to get ahead. A lot of money was spent on infrastructure that wasn’t needed but nobody seemed to care.
I know it’s just an arbitrary number picked but this bit jumped out at me: “You’ve just wasted $15,000 on two months work with a team of contractors” The project may also have been doomed because $15k is not very much for something like they described. But again, fully aware that they probably picked a random number. I’d have just added another zero to make it more realistic.
That sounds really high to me. I personally found 15k way too high already; guess it depends on the details/market/circumstances
I know it’s just an arbitrary number picked but this bit jumped out at me: “You’ve just wasted $15,000 on two months work with a team of contractors” The project may also have been doomed because $15k is not very much for something like they described. But again, fully aware that they probably picked a random number. I’d have just added another zero to make it more realistic.
Either you have the bootstrap founders that will trawl through fiverr to find the cheapest labor (the same types that will scoff and get insulted at anything over $10k), or you have the well-funded founders that will pay whatever it takes.
From experience: Cheapskates and low-ballers will never be happy. They always want something free, more haggle room, more discounts, and always have high demands and expectations. The best thing one can do is to price yourself away from them.
The author is right, but doesn't seem to mention that this could be solved, at least in theory, with better project management. Devs focusing on the wrong thing? Project manager should be on it. Scope creep? Project manager should be on it. Client asking for irrelevant features? Project manager should be on it. Replace those devs with ones who are focused on the right things? Great, but you still have the other probl…
Further, project managers tend to focus on delivering the product stakeholders have asked for on time and on budget.
Product managers however I find are frequently searching for a new expanded scope of stakeholders to brag they're solutioneering to. I find them more often in the "solutions looking for problems" business than I find developers, or at least developers are only doing it on a micro-scale, while product managers will take an entire team/org on 6 month fruitless missions to build software destined for the dustbin.
I know it’s just an arbitrary number picked but this bit jumped out at me: “You’ve just wasted $15,000 on two months work with a team of contractors” The project may also have been doomed because $15k is not very much for something like they described. But again, fully aware that they probably picked a random number. I’d have just added another zero to make it more realistic.
all the author needs is a wordpress site with a couple plugins and a few weeks of back and forth on the design work. if you can't make a good profit on that with a $15k invoice, you're doing something very wrong.
This resonates and one way to describe it is an incentive problem. Someone whose incentives are tightly aligned with the business is going to solve the actual problem and simply and effectively as possible. Someone who is incentivized to build career capital and experience other than via impact (e.g. so they can get uplevelled, pass an external interview loop, etc) is much more likely to focus on unimportant hard pro…
This resonates and one way to describe it is an incentive problem. Someone whose incentives are tightly aligned with the business is going to solve the actual problem and simply and effectively as possible. Someone who is incentivized to build career capital and experience other than via impact (e.g. so they can get uplevelled, pass an external interview loop, etc) is much more likely to focus on unimportant hard pro…
I run into this more often than problems I imagine. A whole series of what ifs and folks imagining things. The worst part is the fixes to their imaginary problem are usually not well thought out and drive things towards worse choices.
I’m a big believer in getting version 1 out the door as problems people imagine often… are never relayed by the actual customer.
I often work with some routing software (let’s say routing packages). There is a simple mode that works great. Anyone can use it.
The issue is people want to establish say 20 rules about how / when / what is routed. Business folks insist that it be “easy” for “anyone to use” just like the existing easy mode.
This is doomed from the start. We can make it easier for sure, but if you have 20 rules with different weighted priorities:
1. It is complex for most people to think of. It will look complex because it is complex.
2. That’s ok because the guy with 20 rules probably has thought about them and understand they have 20 rules.
Then we give them UI to visualize it all and customer is happy.
But the business folks are upset because the visualization is complex… and there we are again.
For the record I usually get through this slog and everyone is happy in the end, but it is a slog due to imaginary problems.
In the imaginary case of the merch selling android app i dont think it is justified to solely blame the developers for the bad product. The root cause for a bad outcome lies in the simple fact that nobody wanted to tell the client that there was already a solution for 20 bucks and absolutely no need for something custom built. NOBODY except the business owner gains anything in this and the client deserves the ripoff…