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This is a fantastic article, and is true in all walks of life. I'm a technical manager is a big corporation, and half of my problem is trying to explain to peop
by eykanal 11y ago
This is a fantastic article, and is true in all walks of life. I'm a technical manager is a big corporation, and half of my problem is trying to explain to people why they need the stuff we do. In this case, they know they have problems, but they have other "forms of aspirin" they've found that half-bandaid the problem. Our solutions are much better, but they don't know that; it's up to me to explain to them what the problem is with their band-aid solutions and why our approach fixes them.
Thinking about this even more, this is the problem faced by virtually all salespeople. You won't buy my whatever until you know why you NEED my whatever. Even if you THINK you need my whatever, I have to make sure you understand what problem my whatever is solving, because if you buy it thinking it solves A but it really solves B then you'll be really pissed when you find out that you just paid for something that doesn't solve your problem (A).
Very good article, and the door/key analogy is fantastic.
- Too 11y agoPeople thinking they have a good solution when they don't is an interesting problem. A good technical example of this is parsing xml with regex or generating xml with string.format, I've had to explain to colleagues why this is bad so many times and many of them are stubborn and wonder why we should change something that "works". Initially they think the difference only carries academic significance, such as claiming i++ is faster than ++i. Usually you have to show them an example of valid xml that fails the regex before they realize that it is a problem. Kornish wrote a comment above about how important it is to know that certain problems have known solutions, in the same way its equally important to know what is not good "solutions" to certain problems.
- strictfp 11y agoGenerating xml with string formatting? I suffer with you.
- shurcooL 11y agoOh man. I suffer so much when I see people using Go's "path" package to manipulate system filepaths (instead of "path/filepath" package)... Just because it happens to work on Linux/OS X (and maybe even modern Windows). They just don't see what's wrong with doing that and it kills me.