3 ms·

I think your frustration largely arises because the problem you work on is uncommon. The goals you are working towards are very large and error is not an option

I think your frustration largely arises because the problem you work on is uncommon. The goals you are working towards are very large and error is not an option because people die or at least massive property damage occurs. Most applications aren't like that. It doesn't matter much if 1/10k image upload to Instagram fail. We have a lot more Instagrams than autonomous cars so the engineering culture conversion is largely dominated by those trade offs. It's interesting because I think we see experiencing the pendulum having swung heavily towards Agile. In the past we used to slow down some crud apps by first drawing UML diagrams. Fingers crossed that we can discover a wider, more differentiated range of engineering practices.

im_down_w_otp 8y ago
My particular vein of work certainly makes me more likely to have interacted with this different way of doing things, but I don't think at all that it's a necessary component to there being reasons to consider it and reap the benefits of it. Because I didn't always used to be in this vein of work, and in retrospect I would have benefited enormously from being more judicious and fastidious in my prior lives using things like TLA+ or requiring even super basic things from my co-workers/teammates like property-based tests. I would have saved so much time and money and heartache over the years. It can't possibly be more efficient to take 50 fairly expensive people and have them iterate 10,000 times toward something that still ends up being fairly broken---and requires maintenance in perpetuity---than it is to take 6 slightly more expensive people, and have them iterate 10 times toward something that does exactly and only what it is supposed to do and requires basically no attention once it's been instantiated, can it? Even if you're Instagram.

3 ms·

I think your frustration largely arises because the problem you work on is uncommon. The goals you are working towards are very large and error is not an option

by ajmurmann 8y ago

im_down_w_otp 8y ago
My particular vein of work certainly makes me more likely to have interacted with this different way of doing things, but I don't think at all that it's a necessary component to there being reasons to consider it and reap the benefits of it. Because I didn't always used to be in this vein of work, and in retrospect I would have benefited enormously from being more judicious and fastidious in my prior lives using things like TLA+ or requiring even super basic things from my co-workers/teammates like property-based tests. I would have saved so much time and money and heartache over the years. It can't possibly be more efficient to take 50 fairly expensive people and have them iterate 10,000 times toward something that still ends up being fairly broken---and requires maintenance in perpetuity---than it is to take 6 slightly more expensive people, and have them iterate 10 times toward something that does exactly and only what it is supposed to do and requires basically no attention once it's been instantiated, can it? Even if you're Instagram.