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Today I learned there’s a name for the general version of this idea. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waterbed_theory At a certain point in a solution everything you do to optimize (“push”) in one area will cause a negative effect in a different area (“bulge”). But this is a nice concrete example.
Another fun failure mode in the same vein: if you are emulating an NVMe device and declare that a write operation is successful once bytes are in memory, you will quickly find yourself buffering arbitrarily large amounts of data as "persist to disk" (SSD speed) falls behind "acknowledge writes" (RAM speed). If you do not add backpressure to your system intentionally, it will be added for you – and you may not like wh…
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Oh thank you for sharing! I had tried describing this earlier in my career and had call it "The complexity shell game" as in attempts to hide complexity only serve to move it around and to trick yourself it's gone. I would much rather use an existing standardized term, so I'm switching to Waterbed Theory, thank you!
I call it the conservation of effort. If you are able to save mental energy in one place, it necessarily has been spent in another.
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I call it the conservation of effort. If you are able to save mental energy in one place, it necessarily has been spent in another.
That's not entirely true though. There are sometimes true wins in things like finding better perspectives, e.g. models that are both simpler and more accurate, good abstractions that separate concerns cleanly, stuff like that.
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That's not entirely true though. There are sometimes true wins in things like finding better perspectives, e.g. models that are both simpler and more accurate, good abstractions that separate concerns cleanly, stuff like that.
You still have to find these things though. Even if you didn't do it, someone, somewhere did spend all that mental energy. There are no shortcuts to saving effort in a closed environment. Same way you can't reduce total energy in a closed system. In fact these two are closely related.
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You still have to find these things though. Even if you didn't do it, someone, somewhere did spend all that mental energy. There are no shortcuts to saving effort in a closed environment. Same way you can't reduce total energy in a closed system. In fact these two are closely related.
This seems like it requires such narrow definitions of things like "closed environment" that it loses applicability to the real world. It's a heuristic worth considering, but not a universal principle.