Nobody gets promoted for simplicity
terriblesoftware.org
Nobody gets promoted for simplicity
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Re: Nobody gets promoted for simplicity
#2Sure 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.
Re: Nobody gets promoted for simplicity
#3Sure 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.
This used to be true. Companies love efficiency. How does this stack up with modern AI? Seems those metrics would go in the opposite directions.
Re: Nobody gets promoted for simplicity
#4I'm trying to sell simplicity to my target market, who I would call "semi-tech literate". Maybe it's stupid and I should sell whatever Forbes thinks is cool, but I just can't shake this feeling that I should be solving actual business problems.
Re: Nobody gets promoted for simplicity
#5Sure 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.
This used to be true. Companies love efficiency. How does this stack up with modern AI? Seems those metrics would go in the opposite directions.
The "time to market" folks finally have everything they could hope for, let's see all of that business value they claim is being missed due to pesky things like security, quality, and scalability checks.
Re: Nobody gets promoted for simplicity
#6Bigger picture, when the thing you try to measure is subtle and difficult, you measure something obvious. That's what happening here.
Re: Nobody gets promoted for simplicity
#7Dijkstra understood it 50 years ago, and again 26 years ago [1]. Nothing changes. Malpractice just propagate and there are zero incentives to build simple, small, and maintainable software.
If the company you work for just push for unnecessary complexity, get out of there! Don't fold!
Re: Nobody gets promoted for simplicity
#8I'm trying to sell simplicity to my target market, who I would call "semi-tech literate". Maybe it's stupid and I should sell whatever Forbes thinks is cool, but I just can't shake this feeling that I should be solving actual business problems.
We failed a bid for a project because of simplicity. We were to migrate a service running on an on-prem Kubernetes installation and a three, or five, node Apache Cassandra cluster to Azure.
The service saw maybe a few hundred transaction per day, total database size: 2 - 3GB. The systems would hold data about each transaction, until processed and then age it out over three months, making the database size fairly stable.
Talking to a developer advocate for Azure we learned that CosmosDB would get a Cassandra API and we got access to the preview. The client was presented with a solution were the service would run as a single container in Azure Websites and using CosmosDB as the database backend. The whole thing could run within the free tier at that point. Massive saving, much easier to manage. We got rejected because the solution didn't feel serious and to simplistic for an organisation of their scale.
On the other hand I also once replaced a BizzTalk server with 50 lines of C# and that was well received by the client, less so of my boss who now couldn't keep sending the bill for a "BizzTalk support contract" (which we honestly couldn't honour anyway).
Re: Nobody gets promoted for simplicity
#9This was already a post 6 hours ago which is now [dead].
What happened?
Re: Nobody gets promoted for simplicity
#10Sure 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.
You are citing negative metrics. The reality is that companies only care about positive metrics: increase marginal revenue by 30%
That's regardless of the lip service they pay to cost cutting or risk reduction. It will only get worse, in the AI economy it's all about growth.