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“This project will only take 2 hours”

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Re: “This project will only take 2 hours”

#231

Post by Complexicate »

tcmart14 wrote: post #147
newaccount74 wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Was it a HP printer? HP last year managed to accidentally revoke their macOS code signing certificate. I'm not sure how much software was affected, but as far as I know all HP software for Mac, including printer drivers, was broken (CRLs are updated automatically even if you have automatic software update disabled)

Nah, it was a Brother printer, I replace it with a cheap HP printer. The Wireless on that one stopped working, I've just given up and my wife uses the cable to print. Well luckily the HP is still playing nice over a USB cable.

If you still have the Brother printer, try disabling IPv6 on the Brother printer.

I remember this issue from a while back. Some update happened, and then wireless printing stopped working on some iOS devices. It happened to a colleague's macbook, and disabling IPv6 on the Brother printer fixed it for us. I can't remember where I found the initial advice, but here's someone else mentioning it: https://discussions.apple.com/thread/250584298

Re: “This project will only take 2 hours”

#233

Post by htrp »

sverhagen wrote: post #103
fumblebee wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The take-home assignment seems to me a slightly broken system; it's easily gameable because there's zero supervision. Let's say there's two candidates for a position who are both asked to complete the take-home assignment, Candidate A and Candidate B. Candidate A is the superior candidate and spends only two hours on the task (as requested), and Candidate B spends 2 days. Candidate B submits the better assignment and…

When I've interviewed using homework like this, it was with the sole purpose of bringing it along and talking to it. That won't be gamed. And, by the way, that lends itself also very well for bringing whatever fitted in the time box, and having a discussion on the meeting about the tasks that remain, and about their prioritization process. You may like it when you see less production code, in favor of some tests! Peo…

This is the right approach. You don't disqualify based on the take home (unless it doesn't work at all).

Re: “This project will only take 2 hours”

#234

Post by kingcharles »

matheusmoreira wrote: post #153
jiggawatts wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I vaguely remember a rant some famous Linux developer went on about how setting up printing in Linux requires a dozen parameters, half of which are arcane nonsense that the printer manufacturer themselves probably doesn't know how to set up correctly. Meanwhile, on an Apple or Windows computer it can be literally just plug and print. The difference is that hiding those arcane input parameters takes work , and a lot o…

Printers are plug and play on Windows? That's not my experience. I have constant problems at work. Settings resetting, stupid printer driver GUIs nagging about ink, prints coming out wrong and making me go into the detailed settings to fix it. Rare are the days where I can just print the stuff I need with no fuss. I'm fortunate enough to be able to solve problems on my own. Coworkers are forced to call support and wa…

I've been working with printers for 35 years and they still find ways to destroy my soul.

This week I discovered my Canon printer has some way to detect "plain [white] paper" and absolutely refuses to print on the high quality "cream" coloured paper instead. No matter what tricks I tried in swapping the paper, as soon as I put the better paper in the tray it would freak out.

Re: “This project will only take 2 hours”

#235

Post by mauvehaus »

Complexicate wrote: post #231
tcmart14 wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nah, it was a Brother printer, I replace it with a cheap HP printer. The Wireless on that one stopped working, I've just given up and my wife uses the cable to print. Well luckily the HP is still playing nice over a USB cable.

If you still have the Brother printer, try disabling IPv6 on the Brother printer. I remember this issue from a while back. Some update happened, and then wireless printing stopped working on some iOS devices. It happened to a colleague's macbook, and disabling IPv6 on the Brother printer fixed it for us. I can't remember where I found the initial advice, but here's someone else mentioning it: https://discussions.appl…

Any sufficiently large discussion of software complexity will spawn a large sub-thread about printers.

Any sufficiently large discussion of printers will beget a number of ad-hoc support sub-threads.

Re: “This project will only take 2 hours”

#236

Post by da_chicken »

ajsnigrutin wrote: post #72

I've gone down this rabbitole before, and yes, there are things that take two hours, and there are things that take a lot more. The problem is the scope - ie. are you trying to do what you said you'll do (miniature software to log urls), or are you adding 100s of requirements to the scope (gui, filters, privacy,...). We had a bunch of .xml files containing some data, and someone wanted a .csv file... sure, an hour ma…

See, I read the article's problem description and think, "Okay, a proof of concept is going to take 2-4 hours. A shippable product is probably going to take 5 to 10 times that long."

IMX, it's not even necessarily feature creep. It's failure to stop and adequately understand what constitutes a minimum viable product. Not viable to sell on the marketplace. Merely viable to deliver to another user.

There's a huge mistake in software development to think that the hard or complicated part is making the algorithm or understanding how your program will interact with it's own data or external data or hardware. That's seldom the actual hard part. The hard part is making it useful to a human being using the system.

If it's just for me, I can use a proof of concept that I wrote in perpetuity. I can deal with how janky it is or the obtuse error messages it spits out. If anybody else has to use it, though, there needs to be a mental model for interacting with the software that is intuitive and comprehensible to the user that doesn't require them to have a comprehensive understanding of the underlying code, clases, and interfaces.

This is the actual hard part of software development, and the bad part is that it's typically the part that nobody likes to do.

That's the lesson the professor is trying to teach here. It's not how to write a program. Nearly any fool can do that. The lesson is: how to author deliverable software.

Re: “This project will only take 2 hours”

#237

Post by chaxor »

toyg wrote: post #112
Jensson wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This was supposed to be a student hobby project, not a company product release. You are thinking of this problem from the perspective of an enterprise programmer, not of a hobbyist enthusiast.

The opposite is actually true. The enterprise programmer thinks nothing of deploying some J2EE monstrosity with "simple" setup scripts and "just change this Windows parameter in registry" and "run this command to create a service to start and stop from Services.msc". That's what they live and breath, that's the bar they are happy to clear. The hobbyist enthusiast, on the other hand, will only have knowledge of actual…

This is probably the most accurate summary of the problems in modern development I have ever read. You're spot on. Thank you.

Re: “This project will only take 2 hours”

#238

Post by n0w »

IggleSniggle wrote: post #212
BlargMcLarg wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Good developers, yes. Which takes experience, given the myriad of colorful personalities, politics and more. Though I don't think it is fair the responsibility is largely put on the developer for "underestimating" when often the corporate is big enough to have specific people gather these requirements and map them out as part of their day-to-day. That's my main problem with this advice and the article. Of course anyo…

My spouse is in healthcare, and at least in the US, it seems to be a similar situation. There’s a big medical structure. And in theory, there’s lots of folks to deal with XYZ. In practice, docs need to do YZ because they are the ones who have the right combination of training and authorization to complete the task. When more people get hired, the doc just has to communicate YZ to more people. Either the task requires…

I think this is a great analogy.

Creating a game of telephone between the stakeholders and the people developing software is often going to impede communication.

The flip side of this is that a lot of technical people lack adequate soft skills to be able to do this requirements gathering well (probably the same can be said about a lot of doctors and what defines a "good" doctor).

Re: “This project will only take 2 hours”

#239

Post by ziml77 »

jeroenhd wrote: post #109
PragmaticPulp wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The programming parts of this would take 2-4 hours This is, literally, the error that the entire article works on dispelling. Anyone can write a rough command line tool that monitors the clipboard and prints to stdout. Writing a usable GUI application is a lot more work. That’s not project management, that’s coding work. The ratio of project management work to coding isn’t 10:1 or even 100:1 like you’re suggesting.

Honestly, I'm a bit rusty but I feel like I could've done this project in C# with WinForms in a bit over 2 hours. Not all the advanced features asked for, but the minimal viable product. It's a shame that Microsoft is shifting away from the old, reliable WinForms for their new UWP system because making a quick and dirty implementation of many or these requirements would actually take very little time for many moderat…

WinForms is still very much supported. They even have a short segment in their VS2022 launch videos dedicated to WinForms development: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=irfQczdVjRA

Re: “This project will only take 2 hours”

#240

Post by ziggus »

sbierwagen wrote: post #73
DeathArrow wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>There's a good chance that this will solve 95% of all needs. Most of the features suggested in the article beyond the original premise are unnecessary. The teacher is the client. The client is the one who will better estimate what is necessary or not. If you own a company and someone wants to contract you for work, you start explaining how what the client says it needs is not necessary and how he can manage with les…

Every idiot with a stupid idea for a piece of software is a client, but vanishingly few clients are good customers. In different words: there are tens or hundreds of thousands of people who can describe software that would be very useful for them, but very few of those ideas would be profitable to fully develop. Opportunity cost! Every stupid idea implemented snuffs out what could have been a good idea.

If a client wants to pay my going rate for development work, then it's profitable.

It may not turn out to be profitable for the client, but that's not my problem.

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