We have beef with AI hallucinating - get 5 people to work on a problem and measure how much stuff they will make up from thin air.
Imaginary problems are the root of bad software
121–130 of 511 posts
Re: Imaginary problems are the root of bad software
#122If anything it's the incentive system in software industry, which is at fault. 1. No designer is given promotion for sticking to conventional designs. It's their creative & clever designs that get them attention and career incentives. 2. No engineer is paid extra for keeping the codebase without growing too much. It's re-writes and the effort he puts in to churn out more solutions (than there are problems) that offer…
There are exceptions to all the above, but only after the worst case burns from failure to do those things. If you are losing customers to competition that doesn't crash, then suddenly you can be the hero by making yours more stable. Of course only if you can do this before the company dies.
Re: Imaginary problems are the root of bad software
#123This is such a great article. Amazon tackles this problem by emphasizing "working backwards", but it ultimately depends on the people who enforces such cultural value. I remember in one of the Uber all-hands meetings, an engineer asked the CTO whether Uber engineers should always make sure their systems can handle at least a million requests per second. To Thuan's credit, he unequivocally said no.
Re: Imaginary problems are the root of bad software
#124---
They’ve put their heart and soul into creating this app, and it has some amazing features:
A state of the art recommendation system
An algorithm generating the transcript of all your streams, in real time
Your front page loads in sub 200ms times all over the world
A streaming protocol and client build almost from scratch, in case you don’t want to rely on Facebook live
A service that allows you to easily integrate over 20 ad exchanges
What a dumb article.
This is just made up. If you hired consultants and they pulled this lawyers would be involved.
I stopped reading here. Why continue reading something based on a fake premise.
Re: Imaginary problems are the root of bad software
#125This 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…
> Someone whose incentives are tightly aligned with the business is going to solve the actual problem and simply and effectively as possible. Equity is the entirely the answer for cutting through all the bullshit. At least in my head. I don't know how it plays in other people's minds but mine sounds like: "If we ship and go live, I get x% of all profit moving forward in my personal scrooge mcduck money bin". Pretty b…
I have a little bit of equity in the company that I work for now. It's super small and early stage, and still between me and the product decision there exists a Designer that reports to a CTO that reports to a CEO. For everything that I want to see done differently, I have to make a case that convinces all these stakeholders that it's the right way. Ultimately, equity or not, my job is to row the ship where the cap'n tells me.
Re: Imaginary problems are the root of bad software
#126If anything it's the incentive system in software industry, which is at fault. 1. No designer is given promotion for sticking to conventional designs. It's their creative & clever designs that get them attention and career incentives. 2. No engineer is paid extra for keeping the codebase without growing too much. It's re-writes and the effort he puts in to churn out more solutions (than there are problems) that offer…
Coworker of mine wrote a thing in java… it was too slow (intensive locking between threads)… so he rewrote it in C… it was crashing all the time (because he sucks), then he rewrote it in go. Got promoted for this feat.
Re: Imaginary problems are the root of bad software
#127If anything it's the incentive system in software industry, which is at fault. 1. No designer is given promotion for sticking to conventional designs. It's their creative & clever designs that get them attention and career incentives. 2. No engineer is paid extra for keeping the codebase without growing too much. It's re-writes and the effort he puts in to churn out more solutions (than there are problems) that offer…
> “No designer is given promotion for sticking to conventional designs. It's their creative & clever designs that get them attention and career incentives.” This is a massive change from my first software industry job in 1997. I was essentially a “design intern who knows HTML” on a team that built a shrinkwrap Windows application for enterprises. The core of the design team was a graphic designer, a cognitive scienti…
Remember times where you could change the theme and all of the apps followed suit ?
Even in Linux there were tools to sync gnome with QT look so you could have one theme applied to every app for nice and consistent look, all the way to how the common icons look.
Nowadays ? Every fucking app gotta have their own different styling. Will the setting icon be three dots, gear, or honey badger ? WHO FUCKING KNOWS. You'd be lucky if you even get a choice between light and dark theme
But hey, we can write same code to work on windows, mac and mobile ! It will work shit in all of them and be slow but we don't care!
Re: Imaginary problems are the root of bad software
#128Earlier quoted context omitted.
> “No designer is given promotion for sticking to conventional designs. It's their creative & clever designs that get them attention and career incentives.” This is a massive change from my first software industry job in 1997. I was essentially a “design intern who knows HTML” on a team that built a shrinkwrap Windows application for enterprises. The core of the design team was a graphic designer, a cognitive scienti…
From a person who started using computers from the early 2000s era: THANK YOU! None of the current SaaS apps I use can come close to the experience of using softwares from that era. Take a simple list view of a typical Windows/Mac software? 1. Command clicking selected multiple objects 2. Shift clicking selected a range. 3. Right clicking brought up selection actions. 4. Double clicking opened an object. This pattern…
And everything had a keybind so if you worked in software every day you could be as fast as cli nerds.
Re: Imaginary problems are the root of bad software
#129Earlier quoted context omitted.
> “No designer is given promotion for sticking to conventional designs. It's their creative & clever designs that get them attention and career incentives.” This is a massive change from my first software industry job in 1997. I was essentially a “design intern who knows HTML” on a team that built a shrinkwrap Windows application for enterprises. The core of the design team was a graphic designer, a cognitive scienti…
From a person who started using computers from the early 2000s era: THANK YOU! None of the current SaaS apps I use can come close to the experience of using softwares from that era. Take a simple list view of a typical Windows/Mac software? 1. Command clicking selected multiple objects 2. Shift clicking selected a range. 3. Right clicking brought up selection actions. 4. Double clicking opened an object. This pattern…
The problem with the controls is mostly because they don't want to pay for Qt (multiplatform toolkit), so instead every company (badly) implements their own controls in HTML to save money. I suspect ultimately they waste much more money than they save.
Re: Imaginary problems are the root of bad software
#130This 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…
Doing the sort of simple solutions to your specific job's actual problems can also be something that constrains your ability to work anywhere else. Often the best simple solution that's tightly integrated into your job's environment is something that is inconceivable as a good idea anywhere else. You're optimizing around other old decisions, good or bad. You're often correctly overfitting a solution to your specific problems.
I've often found myself now having issues even updating my resume, because what I did for the last year at work barely is explainable to other people on my team, let alone to someone in HR at another company. Or the more simple explanation is something that sounds like I'm doing work barely more complex than an intern could have done. Which often isn't wrong, but the intern wouldn't know which simple work to do.
My years of experience in the company's stack and org is valuable to the company, and nontransferable elsewhere.