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Ask HN: Are my expectations on code quality and professionalism too high?

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Re: Ask HN: Are my expectations on code quality and professionalism too high?

#181

Post by p_l »

ransom1538 wrote: post #56

Me as a manager at a startup: "Look, we have 5 months of runway. Does that make sense?" Young dev from large corp: "Yes. But if you don't use Terraform we wont be able to see our infrastructure changes over time. We don't even have a proper code review process." Me as a manager at a startup: "We have two micro instances. Do not install Terraform. Finish the import prototype... now." Young dev from large corp: "Sigh,…

Experience recently went the other way around.

"It's just simple project, don't bring out the big guns".

Somehow, a simple requirement of "make sure we can backup it all and load it elsewhere, manually, nothing fancy" made it so that I lost 5 days purely due to acceptance of manual work at the start.

Re: Ask HN: Are my expectations on code quality and professionalism too high?

#182

Post by baggachipz »

zebraflask wrote: post #177
ransom1538 wrote: post #56

Me as a manager at a startup: "Look, we have 5 months of runway. Does that make sense?" Young dev from large corp: "Yes. But if you don't use Terraform we wont be able to see our infrastructure changes over time. We don't even have a proper code review process." Me as a manager at a startup: "We have two micro instances. Do not install Terraform. Finish the import prototype... now." Young dev from large corp: "Sigh,…

This, unfortunately and hilariously, rings quite true. Not to open the test-driven development can of worms, either, which seems to be part of the OP's dispiritment ... but I've yet to see any scenario where TDD was not a massive waste of time.

Thank you, it feels like heresy whenever I say that... like it's one of those grim realities you're not allowed to point out. I'm all for automated testing in a sane manner, but TDD is so rigid and over-engineered.

"Can't fail your TDD tests..."

taps forehead

"If there's no code to test"

Re: Ask HN: Are my expectations on code quality and professionalism too high?

#184

Post by ncallaway »

crad wrote: post #158
myvoiceismypass wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Rapid prototyping does not mean abandoning established programming practices that help people feel confident about their work.

In my org, I have created a process to clearly define what makes a prototype different from a MVP. It appears to be somewhat successful for what my goals were, which was to prevent prototypes from turning into long-term production code. Prototypes have no restrictions that we would normally place on code (coverage %, automated pipelines, etc) and can only be created in a sandbox AWS account that has no access to our…

This is excellent. I'm always a bit wary of treating something as a "prototype", because of the number of times I've seen things evolve into the actual product.

I like the separation of AWS accounts.

Re: Ask HN: Are my expectations on code quality and professionalism too high?

#185

Post by p_l »

partomniscient wrote: post #142
an_d_rew wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Young dev from large corp: "Sigh, ok, just saying in 2 years from now we wont be in a good spot". Except in my experience it’s not two years , it’s two months . And I can set up two micro instances with terraform in less than an hour. So soon you’re burning your three months of runway with development at 20-50% efficiency, and have no ability to pivot, if needed, because your infrastructure is rigid and hardcoded.…

At the same time, it also means collectively we don't know what we're doing to get where we're going and are just throwing stuff at a wall to see what sticks. It also made me think of the Apollo 13 movie. The engineering/process people got the thing into space, the adaptable/dynamic solve it with 'gaffer-tape and whatever is laying around' people got the thing home. We still need both approaches for different reasons…

Except the people who did the "tape it together"? Those were the same people who made the long process before. That's why they could just tape it together, they were deep in the knowledge of the system they were fixing and thus could tape a kludge together to get them back.

Re: Ask HN: Are my expectations on code quality and professionalism too high?

#186

Post by p_l »

zebraflask wrote: post #177
ransom1538 wrote: post #56

Me as a manager at a startup: "Look, we have 5 months of runway. Does that make sense?" Young dev from large corp: "Yes. But if you don't use Terraform we wont be able to see our infrastructure changes over time. We don't even have a proper code review process." Me as a manager at a startup: "We have two micro instances. Do not install Terraform. Finish the import prototype... now." Young dev from large corp: "Sigh,…

This, unfortunately and hilariously, rings quite true. Not to open the test-driven development can of worms, either, which seems to be part of the OP's dispiritment ... but I've yet to see any scenario where TDD was not a massive waste of time.

Depends. Is it the crazy religious TDD where you somehow are supposed to write tests before writing any code, despite the fact that you're making exploratory code? TDD works best when you have figured out what to test for, unfortunately more than once I encountered people who wanted to write tests for exploratory code, in rigid TDD like environment.

(sidenote: It's possible to do kind-of TDD with exploratory code in certain environments - essentially, you start writing code from top to bottom and fill in missing bits using debugger all the time)

Re: Ask HN: Are my expectations on code quality and professionalism too high?

#187

Post by partomniscient »

p_l wrote: post #185
partomniscient wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At the same time, it also means collectively we don't know what we're doing to get where we're going and are just throwing stuff at a wall to see what sticks. It also made me think of the Apollo 13 movie. The engineering/process people got the thing into space, the adaptable/dynamic solve it with 'gaffer-tape and whatever is laying around' people got the thing home. We still need both approaches for different reasons…

Except the people who did the "tape it together"? Those were the same people who made the long process before. That's why they could just tape it together, they were deep in the knowledge of the system they were fixing and thus could tape a kludge together to get them back.

But that's because in those days the people that built the thing have to do production support once it goes live. That doesn't happen so much in larger organisations because they have separate teams divided along "add/build something new" and "keep it going" boundaries without a lot of cross-pollination.

Re: Ask HN: Are my expectations on code quality and professionalism too high?

#188

Post by p_l »

projektfu wrote: post #173
planxty wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you have some things to learn, as a manager, and as an engineer.

If you have a team of 5, and one wants to implement terraform or some other package like that, what is the current cost to the rest of the team that is unfamiliar with the new software? Will that one person be hobbled for the next few months trying to get their work done and support the other engineers who get blocked by tech they haven’t learned as well? Was the system viable using shell scripts or however it was or…

Would you even have cross-cutting concerns in a team of 5? Given previous experience, it's quite common that if you have a team of 5, it will be reasonable to assume everyone is sharing a bus factor of 1~1.5 and one person will be the infrastructure master. Letting them use whatever tools to leverage until you can have more runway is good.

Re: Ask HN: Are my expectations on code quality and professionalism too high?

#189

Post by ncallaway »

reallydontask wrote: post #179
dangus wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Once you're experienced writing Infrastructure as Code, you always use it, no matter how small the project is. Right now I run a single micro instance for a personal project and I've got the whole thing Terraformed, which took me less than a workday - VPC, subnet, security groups, S3 buckets, and a basic provisioning script to setup the instance's software and cron jobs. It is (eventually, once you learn it) faster a…

> Once you're experienced writing Infrastructure as Code, you always use it, no matter how small the project is. It's a good idea to start early with IaC but one of the marks of a good engineer is knowing what tooling to use for each circumstance. Your app might be a perfect fit for Terraform or it might not, I couldn't possibly comment. Given the info you've provided it seems excessive but it's hard to say for sure

I can't think of a project of any size that terraform would be excessive for.

Agree, if you're introducing it to a new team and don't have time to teach the tooling that could be problematic.

But being somewhat familiar with Terraform I would use it to launch a single EC2 instance. Because it's about as fast to do that as it would be for me to use the AWS Console.

It's not that I think Terraform is needed for that small of a project, it's that it adds no cost even for tiny projects.

Re: Ask HN: Are my expectations on code quality and professionalism too high?

#190

Post by ThrowawayR2 »

PragmaticPulp wrote: post #149
an_d_rew wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Young dev from large corp: "Sigh, ok, just saying in 2 years from now we wont be in a good spot". Except in my experience it’s not two years , it’s two months . And I can set up two micro instances with terraform in less than an hour. So soon you’re burning your three months of runway with development at 20-50% efficiency, and have no ability to pivot, if needed, because your infrastructure is rigid and hardcoded.…

> And I can set up two micro instances with terraform in less than an hour. The post was more of a metaphor than a concrete example. However, as a manager I can’t count how many times my team has declared that they can do something in under a day only to have it become a part-time job for someone to maintain indefinitely, or a multi-week rabbit hole as they debug some unexpected behavior, or technical debt as they ne…

> "I quickly learned that engineers frequently assume the best-case scenario for their time estimates, while managers end up planning for the worst-case scenario."

To be fair, bad managers (and there are a lot of them out there) often get really angry if you give a reasonable worst case scenario time estimate for a task, even if you can back it up.

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