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Nobody gets promoted for simplicity

terriblesoftware.org

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Re: Nobody gets promoted for simplicity

#281

Post by pretzellogician »

austin-cheney wrote: post #189

The name of the game is framing . You don't talk about simplicity, because most people don't really understand what simplicity is. They falsely equate it to easy. Instead you talk about how you complete all your tasks and have so much bandwidth remaining compared to all your peers, the beneficial results of simplicity. Being severely under used while demonstrating the ability to do 2x-10x more work than everybody els…

Except you spend extra time making your code simple, rather than slapping together something that requires extra maintenance from the eventual owners.

Ideally we need metrics saying, "my projects require 30% less support or 50% less brainpower than comparable projects". Things like "average cyclomatic complexity", etc.

Re: Nobody gets promoted for simplicity

#282

Post by vonneumannstan »

sovietswag wrote: post #249
bilsbie wrote: post #73

I had an interview question. What would you do if two different people were emailing a spreadsheet back and forth to track something? I said I’d move them to google sheets. There was about five minutes of awkwardness after that as I was interviewing for software developer. I was supposed to talk about what kind of tool I’d build. I found it kind of eye opening but I’m still not sure what the right lesson to learn was…

Ha! I just had a debate about this with my friend. A certain ferry company uses a big Google Sheet to track where all of its vessels are currently docked in their home port, as well as which employee is assigned to which vessel for the day, etc (it's very information dense with color coding, and employees check it daily to get their vessel assignment). My friend thought this was completely unacceptable for a big comp…

All fun and games until an Intern deletes the original sheet or fatfingers critical information.

Re: Nobody gets promoted for simplicity

#283

Post by andoando »

I just dont agree with this and it hasnt been my experience.

Your job is to deliver value. If you can get stuff done quicker and without it breaking, you did great. Some one who spent more time doing the same thing except took longer and has a more brittle solution they have to keep going back and fixing doesn't look good.

And simple solutions are easier to explain and convince people.

Re: Nobody gets promoted for simplicity

#284

Post by Culonavirus »

sovietswag wrote: post #249
bilsbie wrote: post #73

I had an interview question. What would you do if two different people were emailing a spreadsheet back and forth to track something? I said I’d move them to google sheets. There was about five minutes of awkwardness after that as I was interviewing for software developer. I was supposed to talk about what kind of tool I’d build. I found it kind of eye opening but I’m still not sure what the right lesson to learn was…

Ha! I just had a debate about this with my friend. A certain ferry company uses a big Google Sheet to track where all of its vessels are currently docked in their home port, as well as which employee is assigned to which vessel for the day, etc (it's very information dense with color coding, and employees check it daily to get their vessel assignment). My friend thought this was completely unacceptable for a big comp…

I've seen suppliers using google sheets for a list of tens of thousands of items. Also color coded and filterable and what not. It worked. I could access it programmatically, I had no complaints. (Especially with an experience of some of these suppliers having shitty hosts and shitty platforms and their massive XMLs taking forever to load.) Then again I'm sure I would speak differently if someone just decided to rename a column randomly :D

Re: Nobody gets promoted for simplicity

#285

Post by nopurpose »

Adjacent to it are PR reviews. Suggesting simpler approach in PR almost always causes friction: work is done and tested, why redo? It also doesn't make a good promotion material: keeping landscape clear of overengineered solutions is not something management recognises as a positive contribution.

Re: Nobody gets promoted for simplicity

#286

Post by Cthulhu_ »

musesum wrote: post #235
reedlaw wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe a better way to handle "minimize cyclomatic complexity" would be to set an agent in a loop of code metrics, refactor, test and repeat.

Good idea. Am still a bit shy around token budget spend.

I think this is at the moment the practical limitation to using AI for everything (and what the coding agents themselves also optimize for to some degree, or it's the slider they can play with for price vs quality, the "thinking" models being the exact same, but just burning more tokens).

Re: Nobody gets promoted for simplicity

#287

Post by causal »

codingdave wrote: post #2

Sure they do. You just need to spell it out in business terms, not tech terms: "Reduced incidents by 80%", "Decreased costs by 40%", "Increased performance by 33% while decreasing server footprint by 25%" Simplicity for its own sake is not valued. The results of simplicity are highly valued.

Thanks for the sane take. This article is engagement-porn for every engineer who ever looked at a system they didn't understand and declared they could do it much simpler. It's not because people love to promote complexity-makers, soothing as that thought might be.

Re: Nobody gets promoted for simplicity

#288

Post by __turbobrew__ »

phito wrote: post #118

I keep reading this online but never encounter it in real life. People I work with and for like simple solutions that don't add complexity. It saves them time and money. I really wonder how is it that some people seem to encounter this toxic mentality so much that they assume it is universal. Is it a FAANG/US culture thing where everyone acts based on corrupted incentives?

I recently had a performance review at a FAANG. One engineer on my team has spent the past 3 years working on a complex infrastructure migration which involved about 20 engineers. The migration was completed last year and saved the company some opex costs.

I on the other hand spent 3 weeks optimizing our core service and reduced 2x the opex costs of the large complex 3 year migration.

In my yearly review my manager acknowledged my impact, but said I need to solve more complex problems to get to Staff Engineer. I protested saying that my 3 weeks of work had a larger impact than 20 engineers over 3 years, but he told me that is just how it works.

Re: Nobody gets promoted for simplicity

#289

Post by layer8 »

lucianbr wrote: post #178
MrBuddyCasino wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> They made him do it again and he passed. I would hire the "just use postgres" dude in a heartbeat without re-testing, if the numbers made sense, and perhaps give a stern talking-to to the interviewers. But then again I'm not a unicorn founder, so what do I know.

My read of the story is that the decision to hire was already made, the interviewer goofed but was then set on the right track by his boss.

The question was bad if using Postgres would really be a better solution than designing and implementing a bespoke system, under the stated constraints. Either they should provide a better problem statement, or at least immediately follow up with “okay, suppose you can’t make use of an existing system like Postgres for $reasons”.
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