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

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

#81

Post by WhitneyLand »

s73ver wrote: post #68
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.

Why are your developers feeling they have to pad their timesheets?

He wouldn't have a clue if they were or were not padding their timesheets.

I don't blame him for that part - it doesn't take much complexity before any manager is incapable of understanding every detail.

The scary part is he doesn't seem to understand the fact that this implies the most successful teams will utilize some degree of trust and efficient communication to deal with this reality.

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

#82

Post by WhitneyLand »

dragonwriter wrote: post #38
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.

> "Good enough, done in a week" is a perfectly viable option that is rarely offered by timesheet-padding developers. I see it all the time from timesheet-padding developers who also are in a position that they'll benefit from the higher long-term support costs that that approach generates. It's just a matter of whether they want to pad timesheets in the short term or the long term.

Are you aware that your observation does not generalize very well to developers overall?

Or are you referring to some sort of government bureaucracy dealing with loosely coupled contractors bidding on jobs?

Back on earth I can tell you full time devs at big 4 tech companies padding estimates would be a very difficult thing to pull off, for a variety of realities.

Same situation for many other developers.

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

#83

Post by technion »

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…

How much is IE Edge hurting the build?

I ask because, last project I was on, I "introduced" Edge compat by removing the section of JavaScript that sniffed the UA and kicked people out.

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

#84

Post by jessaustin »

technion wrote: post #83
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…

How much is IE Edge hurting the build? I ask because, last project I was on, I "introduced" Edge compat by removing the section of JavaScript that sniffed the UA and kicked people out.

I appreciate the sentiment, but without rigorous testing this exercise could be a shot in the dark...

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

#85

Post by majormajor »

taneq wrote: post #75
majormajor wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 wh…

> 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. This is a two-edged sword, though. I agree it's best practice from a technical point of view, but enabling wilful ignorance on the part of someone above you in the chain will eventually lead to a showdo…

> This is a two-edged sword, though. I agree it's best practice from a technical point of view, but enabling wilful ignorance on the part of someone above you in the chain will eventually lead to a showdown when you really do need a week to fix it and it really is critical, and they tell you not to, and they'll stick to their guns because (as far as they know) they've been right every time.

Yeah, pushing that too much requires either (a) sufficiently-padded early estimates so it's not a slippage and a nasty surprise (a good practice anyway, but hard), or (b) a sufficient level of don't-give-a-fuck, or (c) really good judgment around "when this is necessary to give them what they need vs what they want" and when not to e.g. truly critical and immediately messagable stuff.

A healthy dose of don't-give-a-fuck/willing-to-say-no is often a good thing anyway, though, if you're able to do it politically/smoothly enough :)

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

#86

Post by jessaustin »

z3t4 wrote: post #27
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…

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.

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

#88

Post by Declanomous »

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…

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.

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

#89

Post by blackoil »

still_grokking wrote: post #64
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…

>The server almost never needs maintenance. None of the workload is real-time. App restarts are acceptable if memory leaks occur. Ah! Classic duct tape programming! Something like this is fine as long as the requirements don't change. But we all know that at a point the requirements will change. And then you have to tell your customer that the "little new requirement" can't be accomplished with a cheap little change…

Lot of times, it is easier to rebuild, then try to an anticipate scale and requirements years in advance. Also in most cases a well written simple solution is easy to refactor, then a complex over engineered architecture.

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

#90

Post by acdha »

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…

That one's hard, however, since it's frequently the case that the user interface is what makes it real to people and leads to plan revisions once they realize that e.g. the cool visualization they asked for doesn't work with 100k data-points.

I haven't found a way around this other than careful communication, which works with most but not all clients.

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