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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?

#51

Post by Luuseens »

WrtCdEvrydy wrote: post #39
mabbo wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tsk, poor choice on your part. You should have started a side consultancy (get a spouse to own it maybe?) and say that you can do it for a mere £40K. Then dump the static file on S3, and let the interest from the £40K in your bank account pay for it.

Okay, that sounds pretty cool. S3 can host static HTML files?

Yes, I host my blog that way:

- Generate static files using Pelican

- Dump the files to S3

- Set up Route53 to point a domain at the bucket

- Set up CloudFront (Amazon's CDN) to sit in front of the S3 bucket, since I found pure S3 to be too slow

Works incredibly well.

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

#52

Post by viraptor »

kristianc wrote: post #50

This is a popular anti-pattern with a name - Yak Shaving: https://medium.com/@firehoseproject/a-guide-to-yak-shaving-y...

That's not yak shaving. Yak shaving is trying to fix issue A and running into issue B. So you try to fix issue B and run into issue C, etc.

This post is about engineering a future-proof solution rather than fixing bugs.

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

#53

Post by AnonNo15 »

"Maybe you ran your SQL query a few times, fixed the errors you got, eyeballed the results, and called it a day. That’s not good enough for code integrated with a product."

Biggest lie ever. That's pretty much a production-quality code here.

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

#54

Post by bichiliad »

This is a little off-topic, but I'm not entirely sure I understand who this article was written for. It reads as a bit condescending to people who might benefit from it (namely the hypothetical MBA who wrote the query), and most of this is what engineers already know about.

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

#55

Post by RonInDune »

Luuseens wrote: post #51
WrtCdEvrydy wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Okay, that sounds pretty cool. S3 can host static HTML files?

Yes, I host my blog that way: - Generate static files using Pelican - Dump the files to S3 - Set up Route53 to point a domain at the bucket - Set up CloudFront (Amazon's CDN) to sit in front of the S3 bucket, since I found pure S3 to be too slow Works incredibly well.

For some reason that feels like cheating on a test but it's brilliant nevertheless. I think I'll try it with the 15 local corner shop sites that I'm hosting out of the goodness of my heart. Thanks!

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

#56

Post by NobodyRalph »

sofaofthedamned wrote: post #6

Had a similar thing a while ago. Very complicated IPSEC tunnels, routers switches firewalls and whatnot between us and our customer. Customers techs were - not great - so needed to make sure port 443 worked through the tunnel. Our side mainly Linux, theirs was mainly Windows 10. Asked a programmer our side (.net) who said it'd take a couple of hours to write a simple webserver, package it up into an .msi and give it…

The right solution would've been a powershell script.

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

#57

Post by zitterbewegung »

If I was a CEO, and wanted to create a way for me to analyze data and I don't know much about efficiencies of SQL for ad-hoc analysis If instead I did have an issue where I did create this issue while doing my ad-hoc analysis I would try to search for solutions that would solve the problem. If this occurs then you probably want a data lake or even a local version/snapshot of production if possible.

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

#59

Post by majormajor »

dsp1234 wrote: post #22
mcbruiser3 wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Conversation from two days ago: manager: Why did you allow this thing to happen. me: It was an edge case that I pointed out 7 months ago. I've put it on the backlog 3 times, and you've removed it each time citing that it's an edge case that would never happen, and other newer features needed to be implemented. manager: That's an engineer's response. Just fix it! me: welp, shrug

I've had luck redirecting this type of question into "why did the process let this happen" where it becomes less my fault vs your fault and more "i did what you said, you did what the business person told you to prioritize, something broke" from a blame-agnostic point of view.

In certain cases I've also overridden the "ignore that for now" in favor of at least some minimal fix because part of my job is to give you what you don't know you need to ask for, not just exactly what you ask for. And there's the value add because compared to people who don't consider that part of their job, my stuff / my team's stuff works better out the door.

Another similar question that I've noticed others not always asking are things like "how often would this be used again, is it just a temporary one-off" which, of course, has an answer that's subject to change, but at least guides the initial design. And when it changes it gets revisited.

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

#60

Post by mullen »

ktRolster wrote: post #29
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…

But it's been down several hours in the past year. So has AWS, so you can kind of feel good.

The good news is that you can blame someone else!

PS> Joking, but not really.

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