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> Any run-of-the-mill engineer can design something which is elegant. A good engineer designs systems to be efficient. A great engineer designs them to be effec
by bargl 8y ago
> Any run-of-the-mill engineer can design something which is elegant. A good engineer designs systems to be efficient. A great engineer designs them to be effective.
This is awesome. I don't know how many times I've seen over engineering in the field. It's crazy. Well we may one day want to do X.
- ythn 8y agoI'm having a hard time visualizing this one. Say the problem is driving a nail into a wall for hanging up a picture. In this case: Elegant = solution is a glass cube Efficient = solution is gasoline-powered nail driver which drives 1000 nails per minute Effective = solution is hammer
- WJW 8y agoA glass cube with rounded edges of course :)
- eddieh 8y agoHm, I think elegant here does not mean classy or fancy. It instead means "ingenious and simple" so an elegant solution is in fact a hammer. Likewise, I think of efficiency as the resources used to accomplish something. While a nail driver would be fast, it isn't really efficient. An efficient solution is also a hammer. And of course the hammer is the effective solution.
- Nomentatus 8y agoCubes are simpler than hammers, was the point.
- jacquesm 8y agoHow does a glass cube drive a nail into the wall for hanging up a picture? If used as a hammer it is just another hammer (and an ineffective one at that because it is going to slide off the nail and cause you injury or shatter and cause you injury).
- Nomentatus 8y agoThat's the point. Just a glance tells you that glass cubes are more elegant than hammers, but it turns out they aren't efficient or effective.
- jacquesm 8y agoThey're just plain wrong. I think any solution should at least try to be an actual solution to the problem.
- Nomentatus 8y agoIt is an actual solution, you can get a nail in with a cube, it probably won't break 'till the fourth or fifth nail. (I have used glass bottles to drive nails.)
- jacquesm 8y ago> (I have used glass bottles to drive nails.) I hope that was just to prove a point and that you were wearing goggles and gloves. If not that's borderline Darwin award territory.
- InitialLastName 8y agoOnly with very specific results, and I'm not sure goggles and gloves would affect either.
- tjalfi 8y agoYour comment reminded me of Alex Papadimoulis' blog entry "Pounding A Nail: Old Shoe or Glass Bottle?"[0]. [0] https://weblogs.asp.net/alex_papadimoulis/408925 https://weblogs.asp.net/alex_papadimoulis/408925
- kbutler 8y agoElegant = using magnetic paint and magents on the back of the picture. You thus do not need a nail, can hang the picture where ever you want, and remove it without leaving a trace. You just have to repaint the house to be able to use it.
- Klathmon 8y agoSee I think of elegant as "set the picture on a table". The engineer might think it solves the problem and does so in a way that is seen as cheaper, easier, and faster. But in reality it's not what was needed and the elegance of the solution will come back to bite them when the first user wants the picture a bit higher (which is normally met with "why would you want to do that?")
- colordrops 8y agoI wouldn't considering something that is not efficient or effective as elegant.
- Nomentatus 8y agoElegant but inadequate is common (to name just one combo.) "Not elegant for this purpose" perverts the meaning of elegant. You can say it's not an elegant solution 'cause it's not a solution, if you like, though. I think you've made a "No true Scotsman" statement, in other words - just swapping "elegant" for "Scotsman."
- erikpukinskis 8y agoI disagree. Elegance is fundamentally tied to purpose and... if not efficiency of operation, efficiency of material and structure. A car which is awful to drive and breaks down all the time, but which has simple clever solutions to problems and clean lines is not elegant at all. Or at best it is half elegant. Elegant is a superset of effectiveness. Also, side note, I would be happy to never see this “No True Scotsman” argument ever again. 9 times out of 10 it’s just used to demonize ideas: “Your idea was used in this horrible way once”/“That mistake is not inherent to the idea”/“No true Scotsman!” That’s not what you did here. So you’re the 10th. But my point is it’s just used as a rhetorical trick, from what I’ve seen.
- jcelerier 8y ago> Elegance is fundamentally tied to purpose .... eh ? what weird definition of elegance are you using ?
- jacquesm 8y agoNot all that weird if you look at it this way: elegance is that which solves the problem at hand with the minimum amount of fuss and materials. That's strongly tied to purpose.
- strong_silent_t 8y agoI like the way Ben Horowitz puts it in his good pm, bad pm document: Good product managers focus the team on revenue and customers. Bad product managers focus team on how many features Microsoft is building. Good product managers define good products that can be executed with a strong effort. Bad product managers define good products that can’t be executed or let engineering build whatever they want (i.e. solve the hardest problem). As an engineer, I want to find the demons that are out there in the problem space and assault them, I want to eliminate all weakness from my precious software. But from the business POV I know we need to provide value to customers quickly and efficiently with the available resources, which is usually not the same thing.
- metaobject 8y agoSometimes I lay in bed at night thinking about the deficiency I haven't had time to address or that isn't a current priority, or the obscure bug I found a while ago that is laying in wait ... then I end up taking a melatonin capsule because my brain won't stop trying to plan/reorganize my next few tasks to squeeze in enough time to solve these issues.
- a_e_k 8y agoParaphrasing Rumsfeld: you go to ship with the software you have, not the software you might want or wish to have at a later time.
- BerislavLopac 8y agoIn software, these three are not exclusive, they're in fact three rungs on the same ladder. In the words attributed to Kent Beck: make it work (effective), make it right (elegant), make it fast (efficient). http://wiki.c2.com/?MakeItWorkMakeItRightMakeItFast http://wiki.c2.com/?MakeItWorkMakeItRightMakeItFast
- sitkack 8y agoThe fourth E is an R as in resilient and reliable.
- WalterBright 8y ago> Any run-of-the-mill engineer can design something which is elegant. Baloney :-) They design things they imagine are elegant. Nobody agrees with them. My take is anybody can design something complicated. It takes genius to design something simple. (and elegance comes from simplicity)
- Klathmon 8y agoPersonally I've never seen a truly great elegant system. The real world is messy, ugly, full of edge cases, and convoluted. An elegant solution will solve 70% maybe 80% of the problem, but never all of it. Realy great engineering, which I feel I have yet to achieve, is managing that complexity and this edge cases and the mess that is the "real world" in a way that is maintainable and manageable and works for all.
- sitkack 8y agoThis whole thread talks about efficient and elegant and effective. Good engineering is mostly in the domain of how a system handles failure. Either by making it a really low likelihood or making it graceful.
- JepZ 8y agoSounds like there aren't enough engineers who have learnt about 'Form Follows Function': https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Form_follows_function https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Form_follows_function