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Imaginary problems are the root of bad software

cerebralab.com

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Re: Imaginary problems are the root of bad software

#61

Post by Gareth321 »

wfhBrian wrote: post #37
stevehind wrote: post #20

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…

And thus we will see the rise of the software solopreneur.

That's been a thing for 30 years. Entrepreneurship is HARD, and tech salaries are fat right now. I think we'll see a lot more software entrepreneurship when there's another recession.

Re: Imaginary problems are the root of bad software

#62

Post by HellDunkel »

golergka wrote: post #40
HellDunkel wrote: post #22

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…

Good reputation?

Pure luxury if you live from hand to mouth.

Re: Imaginary problems are the root of bad software

#64

Post by dagmx »

notatoad wrote: post #36
dagmx wrote: post #17

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.

i think you might be trying to solve the author's imaginary problems. 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.

The problem is that their brief is too vague and the real issue is communication.

At no point is it clear that they’ve discussed off the shelf solutions, or infrastructure (storage, server hiding, CDN etc).

If they had, then they either messed up because 15k over two months is too high or too low. It’s squarely in the: “nobody has actually defined the project territory” for me.

Yes, a Wordpress solution would work, but then why even budget 2 months for it, unless bespoke design is involved. Again that becomes a: this is too low or too high to be realistic

Re: Imaginary problems are the root of bad software

#65

Post by Daniel_sk »

MajimasEyepatch wrote: post #10
bsaul wrote: post #9

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.

Related: my favorite pull requests are the ones that remove more lines of code than they add. People think you need to hoard old code that’s not used anymore like it’s made of gold. It’s not. You aren’t gonna need it, and if you do, you can find it in the git history.

Antoine de Saint-Exupéry — 'Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.'

Re: Imaginary problems are the root of bad software

#66

Post by ericbarrett »

fauigerzigerk wrote: post #44
tyingq wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yep. Facebook got pretty far down the road with PHP, MySQL, memcached, etc.

All they had to do was write a PHP compiler and a new storage engine for MySQL.

The trick was there was enough growth that the savings from the compiler were massive. (I worked there at the time.) The inefficiency of the PHP interpreter was a great problem to have, because it came from the success it enabled.

Re: Imaginary problems are the root of bad software

#67

Post by f1shy »

djbusby wrote: post #56
stevehind wrote: post #20

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…

RDD: Resume Driven Development

I will take that!!!

Re: Imaginary problems are the root of bad software

#68

Post by pydry »

davidmnoll wrote: post #27

I agree with this to some extent. but there’s a flip side too. This mentality is often taken way too far. I had an old boss who wouldn’t allow me to write unit tests citing this thought process. Even at places with decent engineering practices, I’ve seen so many examples of software where you’re limited to a one to many relationship for something that could and easily should have been implemented as many to many, ren…

Ive seen a lot of engineers complain about YAGNI being taken too far but none who have seen their concerns validated by reality.

Re: Imaginary problems are the root of bad software

#69

Post by [deleted] »

dtagames wrote: post #3

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…

[deleted]

Re: Imaginary problems are the root of bad software

#70

Post by cagenut »

fauigerzigerk wrote: post #44
tyingq wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yep. Facebook got pretty far down the road with PHP, MySQL, memcached, etc.

All they had to do was write a PHP compiler and a new storage engine for MySQL.

your comment implies your understanding of the timeline is backwards. they had to do those things after they had gotten hundreds of millions of users.
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