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Occasionally, it is because of that though. If not 'stupid', at least inexperienced. I've had plenty of things I've done that worked, but were, in hindsight,
by mgkimsal 5y ago
Occasionally, it is because of that though. If not 'stupid', at least inexperienced. I've had plenty of things I've done that worked, but were, in hindsight, 'stupid' (and have been called out on that). Sometimes, people try to make a lot of post-hoc justifications for a block of code or a data/tech decision that really is, just... 'stupid'. Again, that's more likely down to inexperience than anything else, but not every decision is a 'good' one just because people 'had their reasons'.
Examples
Having a 'user info' table with 190+ boolean columns for 'country' ('US','CA','DE','IT', etc) in case someone wants to indicate they're 'from' two countries.
Joining views on views of joined views which are themselves built on joins of other views is, likely, not a terribly sound data decision. (X: "It worked fine last year - you must have broken something." Me: "well... last year you had 450 users, and now there are 37000 users - this isn't a performant way of doing this". X: "Can't be true - the person who wrote it is a DBA")
- hinkley 5y ago> Can't be true - the person who wrote it is a DBA Not for long…
- mgkimsal 5y agoheh... well... he was a DBA, and wrote all the application code as well. testing on localhost with 20 sample users, what could possibly go wrong? :)
- noisy_boy 5y ago> Occasionally, it is because of that though. If not 'stupid', at least inexperienced. I've had plenty of things I've done that worked, but were, in hindsight, 'stupid' (and have been called out on that). Sometimes, people try to make a lot of post-hoc justifications for a block of code or a data/tech decision that really is, just... 'stupid'. Again, that's more likely down to inexperience than anything else, but not every decision is a 'good' one just because people 'had their reasons'. I agree on the point regarding the decision being 'stupid' but in this case it was not because of inexperience. On the contrary, it was because an overruling decision by an experienced manager. So the point is that it is not always technical or due to inexperience (though that does happen) - from what I've seen, it is quite common for such things to happen due to hierarchical/ego/political issues as well.
- mgkimsal 5y agoyou're not wrong, but there's a whole class of problems that occur outside 'enterprise' structures. Often it's just a lone cowboy building something for a small business, and the business owner have absolutely no way to determine if what's being delivered is 'good' in any meaningful sense.