Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

I wrote the SQL query in 5 mins. Why does my engineer say it will take a month?

wtfismyengineertalkingabout.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

111–120 of 129 posts

Re: I wrote the SQL query in 5 mins. Why does my engineer say it will take a month?

#111

Post by kogepathic »

catmanjan wrote: post #71
sofaofthedamned wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The endpoint at their end was Windows. No nc. Apologies if that wasn't clear. I was testing our end reaching their endpoint at port 443.

nc is the client, if you could host a webserver surely you could have run nc...

Actually I misunderstood and thought the server was Linux.

You could of course use nc as the client too, but it would be an additional install on Windows. [0]

And nc wouldn't help if the firewall was stateful and actually expected to see HTTPS traffic on port 443, so I do see their logic of putting an actual webserver there.

But without sufficient detail, it does seem at first glance to be overkill ;-)

[0] https://joncraton.org/blog/46/netcat-for-windows/

Re: I wrote the SQL query in 5 mins. Why does my engineer say it will take a month?

#112

Post by brokenmachine »

arethuza wrote: post #12
unethical_ban wrote: post #5

On 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…

I once had an infrastructure guy who worked in the same company quote me £70K for new hardware to host a single static HTML web page. £70K of new hardware! I stuck it on an existing server and nobody noticed though I might have got into trouble with the Change Prevention Board for not using the right form or something... Edit: He did have a carefully worked out explanation of where the money had to be spent.... which…

>Change Prevention Board

Haha, ours is called "Change Management", but they would more correctly be called "Change Prevention", or "Sanity Obstruction".

Re: I wrote the SQL query in 5 mins. Why does my engineer say it will take a month?

#113

Post by brokenmachine »

coolgeek wrote: post #77
arethuza wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I once had an infrastructure guy who worked in the same company quote me £70K for new hardware to host a single static HTML web page. £70K of new hardware! I stuck it on an existing server and nobody noticed though I might have got into trouble with the Change Prevention Board for not using the right form or something... Edit: He did have a carefully worked out explanation of where the money had to be spent.... which…

> though I might have got into trouble with the Change Prevention Board for not using the right form or something... The "or something" and "which I ignored" aren't making you look like the reasonable actor in these interactions

Sounds reasonable to me to save the company £70K. But I'm not a manager, so what would I know.

I doubt it was a mission-critical single static html page.

edit: £70K plus the cost of installation/hardware support/etc/etc.

Re: I wrote the SQL query in 5 mins. Why does my engineer say it will take a month?

#114

Post by dragonwriter »

WhitneyLand wrote: post #82
dragonwriter wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "Good enough, done in a week" is a perfectly viable option that is rarely offered by timesheet-padding developers. I see it all the time from timesheet-padding developers who also are in a position that they'll benefit from the higher long-term support costs that that approach generates. It's just a matter of whether they want to pad timesheets in the short term or the long term.

Are you aware that your observation does not generalize very well to developers overall? Or are you referring to some sort of government bureaucracy dealing with loosely coupled contractors bidding on jobs? Back on earth I can tell you full time devs at big 4 tech companies padding estimates would be a very difficult thing to pull off, for a variety of realities. Same situation for many other developers.

> Are you aware that your observation does not generalize very well to developers overall?

I was responding to (as should be clear, since I quoted it) an upthread​ generalization about what “timesheet-padding developers” would or would not do. It's expressly not a statement about developers generally.

> Back on earth I can tell you full time devs at big 4 tech companies padding estimates would be a very difficult thing

And pointless, since they aren't paid hourly. Timesheet-padding is only incentivized when developers are paid (or work for a company that is paid) based on timesheets, that is, hourly.

But, anyway, I wasn't talking about padding estimates, that was the poster I was responding to. My observations was that developers with incentive to pad timesheets often will do the opposite of padding estimates, going for quick and dirty development solutions which create more maintenance and support hours (of course, that only occurs as a result of structural incentives where the contractors building the system or feature also expect to be supporting it, but that's often the case.)

Re: I wrote the SQL query in 5 mins. Why does my engineer say it will take a month?

#115

Post by mabbo »

Jack000 wrote: post #101
projektir wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I believe Amazon is more robust if your website gets hit by a lot of traffic.

keep in mind S3 bandwidth is roughly 20~30x more expensive than a VPS. I put my photo/video blog on S3 reasoning that it'll handle spikes better. At one point it reached the front page of HN and cost me $450. Afterward I looked at the logs and found that my single $20 linode would have handled it fine...

Definitely depends on your requirements. AWS can indeed charge a bit for bandwidth.

But if you're talking about small static websites, AWS gives you an easy interface, Cloudfront, Route53, etc. It's a very easy way to do some very complex things.

You might also look into billing alarms. I've got some simple background jobs that I run on lambda, pulling some files to S3 every hour. It costs me a buck or two a month. But if it ever looks like it might charge me $20, it will alarm and email me.

Re: I wrote the SQL query in 5 mins. Why does my engineer say it will take a month?

#116

Post by woliveirajr »

acdha wrote: post #90
taneq wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pro tip: Do the user interface last. Or, if you need to do it first for prototyping / mockup reasons, don't show it to anyone you don't have to . Learned that one in my first ever project. We mocked up the entire application in Visual Basic (just windows and buttons, no actual functionality implemented, we just wanted to know if it'd work for them) and then the client got really upset when we couldn't come round and…

That one's hard, however, since it's frequently the case that the user interface is what makes it real to people and leads to plan revisions once they realize that e.g. the cool visualization they asked for doesn't work with 100k data-points. I haven't found a way around this other than careful communication, which works with most but not all clients.

Perhaps doing the user interface in a mockup way. I mean, really like it was draw on paper and not a software-looking software.

Like this: https://media.balsamiq.com/img/examples/wiki-sketch.png

Re: I wrote the SQL query in 5 mins. Why does my engineer say it will take a month?

#117

Post by taneq »

acdha wrote: post #90
taneq wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pro tip: Do the user interface last. Or, if you need to do it first for prototyping / mockup reasons, don't show it to anyone you don't have to . Learned that one in my first ever project. We mocked up the entire application in Visual Basic (just windows and buttons, no actual functionality implemented, we just wanted to know if it'd work for them) and then the client got really upset when we couldn't come round and…

That one's hard, however, since it's frequently the case that the user interface is what makes it real to people and leads to plan revisions once they realize that e.g. the cool visualization they asked for doesn't work with 100k data-points. I haven't found a way around this other than careful communication, which works with most but not all clients.

> I haven't found a way around this other than careful communication, which works with most but not all clients.

My wife does this kind of interface mockup presentation as part of her job, whenever she does a client presentation she starts with "so this is a screenshot of the inside of my head..."

Re: I wrote the SQL query in 5 mins. Why does my engineer say it will take a month?

#119

Post by mancerayder »

toomuchtodo wrote: post #104
mancerayder wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 completi…

DevOps guy here! Completely agree. Reliable infrastructure at the cost of velocity isn't just good practice, it's self-preservation if you're ops.

Yeah. I think that's a huge part of the reason why the so-called 'full stack developers' will probably never obviate pure 'DevOps' roles. A lot of people can't wrap their heads around why setting up infrastructure takes so much time, and focus attention on speed of raw product (code) delivery.

Re: I wrote the SQL query in 5 mins. Why does my engineer say it will take a month?

#120

Post by unethical_ban »

mancerayder wrote: post #100
unethical_ban wrote: post #5

On 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…

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 completi…

Ah, see, we're talking about different things.

Our little request queue, though prod-necessary, only needs 98-99% uptime. Same with much of our automation. Once you ask the simple question "Does this cause an interruption to our core business, or to security?" and you can say "no", HA requirements go down, down, down.

Post reply on HN