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I agree. About a year ago we hired a new person at work and he immediately started looking for ways to improve anything and everything. The problem is, nearly
by daten 16y ago
I agree. About a year ago we hired a new person at work and he immediately started looking for ways to improve anything and everything. The problem is, nearly everything we had that wasn't optimal, was still actually "good enough" for our needs and usually included some complexity that wasn't obvious at first glance. He ignored our "if it's not broken, don't fix it" advice and every single time he tried to improve something he ended up breaking it or making it worse.
Sometimes a simple but sub-optimal solution that gets the job done well enough and reliably is better than an optimized solution that includes downtime and requires extra maintenance. I don't think the person offering the advice to leave things alone is always the naïve one.
- ugh 16y agoIf you back your case against change with real arguments (like “There will be massive downtime.” and “Extra maintenance will be necessary.”) you certainly aren’t naïve. But you are very naïve indeed if all you ever say to anyone proposing any change to working systems is “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it!”
- chris_j 16y agoAgreed. In reality, there's a balance to be made between the cost of maintaining the status quo (in the event that the status quo sucks) and the cost of making changes. One thing that really frustrated me when I started my career is that the cost of making changes turns out to be non-trivial. If you're shipping software to customers then making changes to the software involves a lot of work planning testing, packaging and so on. Maybe that's one of the reasons why hosting web apps is so much easier than selling shrink-wrapped software in a box.
- deleted 16y ago[deleted]