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Nobody gets promoted for simplicity

terriblesoftware.org

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Re: Nobody gets promoted for simplicity

#81

Post by zipy124 »

bilsbie wrote: post #73

I had an interview question. What would you do if two different people were emailing a spreadsheet back and forth to track something? I said I’d move them to google sheets. There was about five minutes of awkwardness after that as I was interviewing for software developer. I was supposed to talk about what kind of tool I’d build. I found it kind of eye opening but I’m still not sure what the right lesson to learn was…

I mean you gave the right answer imho. Software engineers are just business people whose main tool is coding. You know you're good if you don't reach for the hammer when you don't have a nail.

Re: Nobody gets promoted for simplicity

#82

Post by stego-tech »

Spitting facts, here.

I built a showback model at a prior org. Re-used shelfware for the POC, did the research on granular costs for storage, compute, real estate, electricity, HVAC maintenance, hardware amortization, the whole deal. Could tell you down to the penny how much a given estate cost on-prem.

Simple. Elegant. $0 in spend to get running in production, modest spend to expand into public cloud (licensing, mainly). Went absolutely nowhere.

Got RIFed. On the way out the door, I hear a whole-ass team did the same thing, using additional budget, with lower confidence results. The biggest difference of all? My model gave you the actual cost in local currency, theirs gave you an imagined score.

The complexity (cost of a team, unnecessary scoring) was rewarded, not the simplicity.

Re: Nobody gets promoted for simplicity

#83

Post by withinboredom »

wccrawford wrote: post #23
codingdave wrote: post #2

Sure they do. You just need to spell it out in business terms, not tech terms: "Reduced incidents by 80%", "Decreased costs by 40%", "Increased performance by 33% while decreasing server footprint by 25%" Simplicity for its own sake is not valued. The results of simplicity are highly valued.

Absolutely. And if you asked them if they're rather have it sooner, or keep it simpler, they'd pick "sooner" every time.

I once used the analogy of the PM coming to the shop with a car that had a barely running engine and broken windows, and he's only letting me fix the windows.

His response: "I can sell a good looking car and then charge them for a better running engine"...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T4Upf_B9RLQ hits a little too close to home.

Re: Nobody gets promoted for simplicity

#84

Post by winwang »

HarHarVeryFunny wrote: post #56

I forget who said it, but it seems that AI is basically an amplifier of the talents (or lack of them) of whoever is wielding the tool. In the hands of an experienced developer/designer, AI will help them achieve a good result faster. In the hands of someone inexperienced, out of their depth, AI will just help them create a mess faster, and without the skill to assess what's been generated they may not even know it.

What about someone inexperienced but skeptical, using AI to learn + fix their own code before opening the PR?

Re: Nobody gets promoted for simplicity

#86

Post by psychoslave »

Any system that make rewarding path based on individual contributions as this defect. As opposed to one insuring that the overall result benefits is evenly distributed among all the engaged parties.

The obvious outcome will be that the most skilled pretenders optimizing for their selfish profit narrow view, no matter what the consequences will be for the collectivity on large scale and at long terms.

Re: Nobody gets promoted for simplicity

#87

Post by Folcon »

bilsbie wrote: post #73

I had an interview question. What would you do if two different people were emailing a spreadsheet back and forth to track something? I said I’d move them to google sheets. There was about five minutes of awkwardness after that as I was interviewing for software developer. I was supposed to talk about what kind of tool I’d build. I found it kind of eye opening but I’m still not sure what the right lesson to learn was…

Honestly, if I'd have heard that, I'd hire you in a heartbeat, you solved the problem without increasing total cost of ownership to the company and meant we could move forwards

I'd actually trust you to take on harder problems

Doesn't really matter what the situation is, there's much more that can be achieved in my book with that kind of mindset :)

I'm also of the opinion that in an increasingly LLM software written world, being able to have this kind of mindset will actually be really valuable

Re: Nobody gets promoted for simplicity

#88

Post by forgetfreeman »

yudhiyudhi wrote: post #65
shafyy wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not sure if you're kidding or not, but to write great maintable code, you need a lot of understanding that a LLM just doesn't have, like history, business context, company culture etc. Also, I doubt that in it's training data it has a lot of good examples of great maintainable code to pull from.

Neither do most humans writing such code, i have seen llms generate better code than 90% of coders I have seen in the last 20 years

Admitting you've spent two decades on a career stuck working in the kind of sweatshops that hire people who can't actually code isn't much of a flex, and certainly doesn't lend a whole lot of credence to your argument.

Re: Nobody gets promoted for simplicity

#89

Post by raffael_de »

bilsbie wrote: post #73

I had an interview question. What would you do if two different people were emailing a spreadsheet back and forth to track something? I said I’d move them to google sheets. There was about five minutes of awkwardness after that as I was interviewing for software developer. I was supposed to talk about what kind of tool I’d build. I found it kind of eye opening but I’m still not sure what the right lesson to learn was…

depends on what metric it is that _you_ want to optimize. i would have given the same answer, then aikidoed their confusion into some quick lecture on efficiency of software solutions in a business context and finally a segway into a project i worked on (or made up on a whim) of related relevance that i assume would be more interesting to talk about instead. but given my rather unimpressive career i'd suggest to not listen to me.

Re: Nobody gets promoted for simplicity

#90

Post by swiftcoder »

gwbas1c wrote: post #80
bilsbie wrote: post #73

I had an interview question. What would you do if two different people were emailing a spreadsheet back and forth to track something? I said I’d move them to google sheets. There was about five minutes of awkwardness after that as I was interviewing for software developer. I was supposed to talk about what kind of tool I’d build. I found it kind of eye opening but I’m still not sure what the right lesson to learn was…

Probably that you didn't want the job? At least from the point of view of the interviewer, this was the point where they should give you a polite "hey, play along" nudge.

> At least from the point of view of the interviewer, this was the point where they should give you a polite "hey, play along" nudge.

That may be the game, but we all know it's bullshit, and we shouldn't be playing along.

If a member of my team actually proposed building a bespoke system for something that can be straightforwardly done in a spreadsheet, we'd be having some conversations about ongoing maintenance costs of software

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