I wrote the SQL query in 5 mins. Why does my engineer say it will take a month?
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I wrote the SQL query in 5 mins. Why does my engineer say it will take a month?
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Re: I wrote the SQL query in 5 mins. Why does my engineer say it will take a month?
#2[deleted]
Re: I wrote the SQL query in 5 mins. Why does my engineer say it will take a month?
#3Great Post! Most people understimate the depth of simple-looking tasks: it's not just managers that make this mistake. Even experienced engineers can end up not realizing all the complexity in the beginning.
Re: I wrote the SQL query in 5 mins. Why does my engineer say it will take a month?
#4Nice. I wrote something similar [1] after noticing that it's easy for developers to make this mistake too (especially more junior developers) -- once your proof of concept works, you still are far from shipping.
Re: I wrote the SQL query in 5 mins. Why does my engineer say it will take a month?
#5On the flip side, when something DOESN'T need HA, sub-millisecond query response time, or lynx and IE Edge compatability, people need to know when "good enough" is good enough.
On my ops team, we've gotten some flak for not building robust enough of a request queue for some tasks. But it's been down several hours in the past year. The server almost never needs maintenance. None of the workload is real-time. App restarts are acceptable if memory leaks occur.
If we did everything by the enterprise book, we'd still be 70% of the way to a deployed product, instead of 15 months into its completion.
Re: I wrote the SQL query in 5 mins. Why does my engineer say it will take a month?
#6Had a similar thing a while ago. Very complicated IPSEC tunnels, routers switches firewalls and whatnot between us and our customer. Customers techs were - not great - so needed to make sure port 443 worked through the tunnel. Our side mainly Linux, theirs was mainly Windows 10.
Asked a programmer our side (.net) who said it'd take a couple of hours to write a simple webserver, package it up into an .msi and give it us. I got annoyed, did it in Golang in about 10 lines of code.
I then realised i'd compiled a Linux executable on Linux, remembered it did cross-compiling, 10 seconds later I had a Windows .exe. All for a simple webserver that printed "cock", not useful but it proved the tunnels worked.
Sometimes we overcomplicate the simplest shit.
EDIT: As it wasn't clear (my fault) - we were trying to get to port 443 at their end - they were on Windows, we mainly Linux but the guys I asked were .net programmers..
Re: I wrote the SQL query in 5 mins. Why does my engineer say it will take a month?
#7On the flip side, when something DOESN'T need HA, sub-millisecond query response time, or lynx and IE Edge compatability, people need to know when "good enough" is good enough. On my ops team, we've gotten some flak for not building robust enough of a request queue for some tasks. But it's been down several hours in the past year. The server almost never needs maintenance. None of the workload is real-time. App resta…
Exactly, this is the substantial other side of the argument that almost always seems to be left out of the discussion.
"Good enough, done in a week" is a perfectly viable option that is rarely offered by timesheet-padding developers.
Re: I wrote the SQL query in 5 mins. Why does my engineer say it will take a month?
#8Had a similar thing a while ago. Very complicated IPSEC tunnels, routers switches firewalls and whatnot between us and our customer. Customers techs were - not great - so needed to make sure port 443 worked through the tunnel. Our side mainly Linux, theirs was mainly Windows 10. Asked a programmer our side (.net) who said it'd take a couple of hours to write a simple webserver, package it up into an .msi and give it…
It might also be possible that we don't know the simplest methods of doing something. I'm not sure if there is a simpler way to do it from the Windows side of things than what this person told you.
I wouldn't know how to do it in Golang because I don't use it. I would default to my most comfortable language, which is almost guaranteed to not be the most efficient method to do anything.
Re: I wrote the SQL query in 5 mins. Why does my engineer say it will take a month?
#9Had a similar thing a while ago. Very complicated IPSEC tunnels, routers switches firewalls and whatnot between us and our customer. Customers techs were - not great - so needed to make sure port 443 worked through the tunnel. Our side mainly Linux, theirs was mainly Windows 10. Asked a programmer our side (.net) who said it'd take a couple of hours to write a simple webserver, package it up into an .msi and give it…
> Sometimes we overcomplicate the simplest shit.
Indeed. Why not use nc and telnet on port 443 to test? Linux already has nc and Windows already has telnet.
Re: I wrote the SQL query in 5 mins. Why does my engineer say it will take a month?
#10[deleted]