3 ms·

> Imagine being in a software team and disregarding what others are doing? Screw the rest of the team, I'll work on my own better solution and ignore the parts

by srean 9y ago

> Imagine being in a software team and disregarding what others are doing? Screw the rest of the team, I'll work on my own better solution and ignore the parts that are already working well! If you are competent, have a realistic estimate of your competence, this might not be a bad idea if what you need is a purely technical solution. In many big organizations (lets leave them nameless) most of your time might be going in navigating the politics, guess-estimating different people's internal incentives and how to steer with or around them, not enough time might remain for thinking about the actual technical problem. In these organizations its necessary to take care of these things, because even if you figured out a great solution that ticked all the technical boxes, including technical compatibility with others, all that will come to nought if it is not in alignment with the social and political aspects.

mannykannot 9y ago
Unfortunately, for every one who is that person in that situation, there are several who merely think they are, at least in my experience (the most common form seems to be the covert rewriter whose work is more 'pure', 'object-oriented | functional', 'general', 'flexible', 'performant', 'reusable', or my favorite, 'simple' (for some definition of 'simple') than will ever be needed, at the cost of considerable additional (and undocumented) complexity.)
- srean 9y ago
  Not only do I agree with you, I think it might actually be worse. Seen enough primadonnas who think they can walk on water and have.
dotancohen 9y ago
> If you are competent, have a realistic estimate of your competence, this might not be a bad idea if what you need is a purely technical solution. This. Just _yesterday_ some xls-to-json library that has been used in the past was choking on an innocent-looking file. After fiddling with the thing for over an hour, including using LibreOffice to change the file format, I still could not get the library to read the file. In five minutes I had a Python script which read the CSV version of the file and converted it to the necessary format. I chanced writing the script because that I knew that I could. In other situations, gambling company time on "I _might_ be able to help" usually leads to wasting company time.

by srean 9y ago

mannykannot 9y ago

Unfortunately, for every one who is that person in that situation, there are several who merely think they are, at least in my experience (the most common form seems to be the covert rewriter whose work is more 'pure', 'object-oriented | functional', 'general', 'flexible', 'performant', 'reusable', or my favorite, 'simple' (for some definition of 'simple') than will ever be needed, at the cost of considerable additional (and undocumented) complexity.)

srean 9y ago
Not only do I agree with you, I think it might actually be worse. Seen enough primadonnas who think they can walk on water and have.

dotancohen 9y ago

> If you are competent, have a realistic estimate of your competence, this might not be a bad idea if what you need is a purely technical solution. This. Just _yesterday_ some xls-to-json library that has been used in the past was choking on an innocent-looking file. After fiddling with the thing for over an hour, including using LibreOffice to change the file format, I still could not get the library to read the file. In five minutes I had a Python script which read the CSV version of the file and converted it to the necessary format. I chanced writing the script because that I knew that I could. In other situations, gambling company time on "I _might_ be able to help" usually leads to wasting company time.