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

wtfismyengineertalkingabout.com

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

#121

Post by borplk »

mcbruiser3 wrote: post #15
mistermann wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

seems often developers tend to over engineer or focus on edge cases that inflate costs, and not given enough attention to ROI

The problem is the businesses want to have their cake and eat it too.

Damned if you do damned if you don't.

If you don't focus on edge cases then later it's your fault for being sloppy.

If you focus on edge cases you are "over engineering".

Most of the time "over engineering" just means "I wish this was cheaper".

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

#122

Post by coolgeek »

brokenmachine wrote: post #113
coolgeek wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

The poster

  - "ignored ... a carefully worked out explanation"
  - doesn't (or doesn't care enough to) understand the company's established processes ("...or something")
Given that s/he thus didn't (couldn't) relate these in his/her telling of the story, there's at least the possibility that what's missing is less flattering or even completely contradictory to their telling.

Just as we can all point to examples of process absurdity, we can all point to examples of

  - failures because process didn't exist
  - companies with good process
At the very least, from an objective standpoint, the poster's telling of the story reflects poorly on them

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

#123

Post by mancerayder »

unethical_ban wrote: post #120
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…

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.

Yeah, we're both arguing against extreme positions.

I fully agree that so long as SLA's are negotiated proportionally to infrastructure investment in money and time, then it's all good.

I've personally seen Ops teams get tricked by being told things weren't important, when in fact they became production emergencies with yelling when they invariably went down.

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

#124

Post by WhitneyLand »

manigandham wrote: post #103
WhitneyLand wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do you know it was more time than necessary? Did you give them the time they asked for and notice at the end of the project people were sitting around bored? Or did you not give them the time they asked for and declare yourself correct after squeezing in a deadline? And if so how do you know what corners were cut or what technical debt was accrued to make a deadline the team did not sign off on? Whether every sin…

15+ years of experience gives me enough info to know what timelines should normally be. These people/teams took far longer and produced less (overall and per day). This is human nature, people will look out for themselves. Many, if not most, are looking to do the least amount of work in return for the largest reward, and it's very easy at bigger companies to pad hours, compounded by bureaucracy and poor management. T…

>15+ years of experience gives me enough info to know what timelines should normally be

This is my concern. It absolutely doesn't give you that knowledge. Accurately estimating development of non-trivial software is still an open problem. The best solution we have to date is to accept this fact and use it in our process and planning to our advantage when possible.

If the work you're talking about is rote and mostly a matter of repeating a pattern rather than innovating and engineering, sure I can see that being more predictable. Unfortunately quite a bit of software development does not fall into that bucket.

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

#125

Post by grogenaut »

salesguy222 wrote: post #95
grogenaut wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Huh, where I work the managers are the ones who get fired for bad ops or oversights. The engineers are just penalized by dealing with shitty decisions so they dream about quitting. The smart ones just fulton out of shitty managers to good teams.

You most likely work for a company that hasn't yet been overrun by the corporate world's version of "career politicians" who are there to leech a paycheck at all costs. They often blame others while finding very sneaky and specific ways to, despite all odds, rise to a relatively insulated level without any modicum of technical or managerial prowess congrats!!!

It's likely the ship, drive more revenue or get fired culture that keeps people from settling in.

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

#126

Post by sofaofthedamned »

jessaustin wrote: post #86
z3t4 wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Whatever time it took you to write that program, it could have been saved by letting the other guy do it, even if it would take much more of his time.

Yeah but by doing it oneself, one knows that it will work, or at least that if it doesn't work one won't have to sit through interminable conference calls on the topic of Why the Fact that It Won't Work Isn't Actually that Other Dude's Fault.

That was pretty much it. Guys at the end were evasive, lazy and not capable and the project was dragging on. Best to give them an .exe with no dependencies, get them to click on it and verify the tunnels that way.

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

#127

Post by mmcnl »

taneq wrote: post #80
Declanomous wrote: post #14

> Nothing ever works as soon as an engineer writes code; it is an iterative process. One of my complaints about working in an environment where I am the only person who can program is that nobody else understands this. I've taken the time to explain this point to people, and they seem to grasp it fairly well, but once they see something that somewhat resembles the final product they get really impatient. The last 25%…

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…

I don't think that's a smart move either. There's a lot of value in shipping early ("fail fast, fail early"). It's all about managing expectations, not showing a UI at all isn't a good way to do so.

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

#128

Post by mmcnl »

Declanomous wrote: post #88
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's a good tip. I learned that after the first big project I did. Nobody paid any attention to the features, they just wanted me to move buttons back and forth.

You're addressing the wrong problem. The real problem is that you're not talking to the right person.

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

#129

Post by brokenmachine »

coolgeek wrote: post #122
brokenmachine wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The poster - "ignored ... a carefully worked out explanation" - doesn't (or doesn't care enough to) understand the company's established processes ("...or something") Given that s/he thus didn't (couldn't) relate these in his/her telling of the story, there's at least the possibility that what's missing is less flattering or even completely contradictory to their telling. Just as we can all point to examples of proce…

I guess I'm not objective then because the only fact I need is "£70K to host a single static webpage on an internal network".

£70K to host one static webpage is not a good process or "carefully worked out explanation" any way you cut it.

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