6 ms·

> These aren't engineering decisions, they're business decisions All engineering (including "real" ones like civil or mechanical) is about fitting your require

> These aren't engineering decisions, they're business decisions All engineering (including "real" ones like civil or mechanical) is about fitting your requirements within budgets. When one's building a skyscraper, you try to build it in a way that minimizes the cost while satisfying all requirements (it shouldn't fall down given such and such conditions, etc.) Engineering is largely the art of solving problems that fit in real-world constraints and one such [major] constraint it cost. When you build software, you're not given 10 years, a research team and infinite money. You're given just enough resources to build something that satisfies requirements and is the lowest cost (financially and temporally). There's always a way to build things "better" but that's not the point.

pc86 5y ago
If HN had an equivalent of Reddit Gold, this comment would deserve a couple of them. Engineering without constraints is easy, but it's not engineering.
- xboxnolifes 5y ago
  Engineering without constraints is theory.
  - biztos 5y ago
    Or Product Management?
    - bfung 5y ago
      *Marketing. Imagine a world where our currency is decentralized and the user owns their own data! kek.
  - tremon 5y ago
    Proper engineering also takes into account the end users, even the ones that aren't paying for it. If other engineering disciplines were as hell-bent on cutting corners as SWE, these situations would be common-place: - "cars older than 5 years are not supported on this bridge" - "Sure, we can perform maintenance on this bridge, but with every round of maintenance work, the maximum speed across the bridge will be lowered by 5mph" - "No, I'm sorry, you can't call our office from a landline. We only accept support calls from a Sprint mobile device, and the contract must be less than a year old" - "What do you mean, you need to replace a fuse? You can't do that, they're built-in. Please contact our office to buy a new house". - "Sure, our new Model T does 5 gallons to the mile, but look at its color! It's not just black, it's Vanta Black (tm)! And look at these rounded bumpers, aren't they a marvel of engineering?"
mbell 5y ago
"Any idiot can build a bridge that stands, but it takes an engineer to build a bridge that barely stands." - Someone
- diordiderot 5y ago
  Brilliant!
- int0x2e 5y ago
  Your quote is better, but for people that have a hard time with that analogy, I like using the example of building a 4-story concrete/brick building - anyone can make a building stand strong by filling it with concrete / bricks. It takes precise engineering to know how thin you can make the walls/supports to make that building worth building.
  - filmor 5y ago
    If you just mindlessly fill everything with bricks and concrete, you likely need to make the lower walls thicker than the upper ones to support the weight... The whole engineering process can be done without ever looking at the budget as long as the framework is given ("use these materials", "you have this much space").
    - dmd 5y ago
      And who came up with that framework?
- ahartmetz 5y ago
  With different constraints... "The perfect race car crosses the finish line first and then completely disintegrates" - Ferdinand Porsche (I took some liberty with the translation - the idea is that everything breaks at the same time.)
  - throw0101a 5y ago
    "The perfect racing car crosses the finish line first and subsequently falls into its component parts." ? * https://quotefancy.com/quote/1791488/Ferdinand-Porsche-The-perfect-racing-car-crosses-the-finish-line-first-and-subsequently https://quotefancy.com/quote/1791488/Ferdinand-Porsche-The-p...
Ultimatt 5y ago
Feels like everyone is very disinterested in the cost to the user with most "modern ways" of doing things. Many webpages use far too much resource to just communicate text. Web adverts are especially awful for this. I could browse the web with dialup and a machine a thousandth as powerful as my phone. So as a consumer why do I need to "upgrade" what was the added value above Google scale is delivering computationally intense adverts I then waste cycles blocking?
- coliveira 5y ago
  But the cost to the user is not considered, even in the real world. For example, transportation decisions are made in the airline industry, and they rarely consider how much this will financially impact the lives of passengers. The same pattern is replicated everywhere: companies work to maximize their profits, while their clients have to deal with possible financial losses.
- emodendroket 5y ago
  Of course they are, because the user does not reward them for being sparing of resources that are, frankly, insignificant on modern devices. Might be different in you were operating in a market where people were largely relying on very low-powered devices, though.
  - tremon 5y ago
    That's a circular argument, because "on modern devices" moves the goalposts every year. I still have a Galaxy Note II, which I would definitively classify as a modern device. But some webpages have terrible performance on it, because anything older than 3 years is not worth optimizing for. Same thing with old iPhones: the only reason they don't work reliably today is because each piece of "modern software" is less efficient than yesteryear's equivalent, and the constant redefining of what constitutes a "modern device" is what perpetuates the problem. This isn't an engineering problem, it's a consumerist dystopia. The computing market is encouraging wastefulness in all dimensions: useful device lifetime, computing costs (bitcoin farming anyone?), software efficiency, framework longevity (jquery, angular, meteor, react), dependency management (NodeJS). None of those problems are new, but every new entrant seems hell-bent on outdoing the wastefulness of its previous incarnation.
2muchcoffeeman 5y ago
I wouldn’t be surprised if solving the problem with the Mayors constraints increased costs though. I have a few stories where senior management, or a preferred developer had some pet project. Or crazy ideology. So we adopted that dispute protests. If we picked a standard way we would have been done faster, cheaper and with fewer bugs.
rahimiali 5y ago
Ok. What is the art of building things that are good, but violate some constraints of the real world? I’d like to use the products from that discipline.
- goto11 5y ago
  > Ok. What is the art of building things that are good, but violate some constraints of the real world? Science fiction. Somebody designs user interfaces for use in Hollywood movies. They don't have to be practical or even feasible, they just have to look cool.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- lgessler 5y ago
  Programming in Haskell. Jokes aside, do you really not understand what GP means? "Real-world constraints" are the things like having to make money or having to do something with only 2 other programmers to help you. Nobody's claiming that, for example, academics (who don't need to have products that money) don't have other problems (like grant writing or juggling academic responsibilities), but that isn't what people mean by "real-world constraints".
- dragonwriter 5y ago
  > What is the art of building things that are good, but violate some constraints of the real world? Magic.
- masklinn 5y ago
  > What is the art of building things that are good, but violate some constraints of the real world? “The romans were so much better at building stuff”. You could make buildings matching those, they’d be massively over-engineered and overpriced compared to the modern equivalent, and significantly more limited in suitable locations.
bryanrasmussen 5y ago
also within time constraints, building an electron app in the scenario outlined is probably a lot quicker. Normally building something quicker implies that later maintainability is adversely affected, but in this case the tradeoff is not time vs. maintainability, but time vs. performance. Performance has generally been getting the short end of the stick since early Windows days anyway when Gates had people build not for what a computer could handle when the application was built, but rather what it could handle a year down the road. >When you build software, you're not given 10 years, a research team and infinite money. So actually you don't need all that to identify when there is a bird in the picture anymore, what's the new bird in a picture requirement? https://xkcd.com/1425/ https://xkcd.com/1425/
- CRConrad 5y ago
  > also within time constraints, building an electron app in the scenario outlined is probably a lot quicker. But building it in Free Pascal/ Lazarus is (almost?) as portable across systems, probably at least as quick, and comes without all the horrendous overhead bloat.
tluyben2 5y ago
But you can do this satisfying requirements with different interpretations: here in HN we cry and whine when database queries are not efficient, when code is suboptimal, when sites are hacked and leak info and many more things. These things were all probably fine within the requirements. Just like this crap experience for the user with Electron. So where do I draw the line? And why?

pc86 5y ago

If HN had an equivalent of Reddit Gold, this comment would deserve a couple of them. Engineering without constraints is easy, but it's not engineering.

xboxnolifes 5y ago
Engineering without constraints is theory.
- biztos 5y ago
  Or Product Management?
  - bfung 5y ago
    *Marketing. Imagine a world where our currency is decentralized and the user owns their own data! kek.
- tremon 5y ago
  Proper engineering also takes into account the end users, even the ones that aren't paying for it. If other engineering disciplines were as hell-bent on cutting corners as SWE, these situations would be common-place: - "cars older than 5 years are not supported on this bridge" - "Sure, we can perform maintenance on this bridge, but with every round of maintenance work, the maximum speed across the bridge will be lowered by 5mph" - "No, I'm sorry, you can't call our office from a landline. We only accept support calls from a Sprint mobile device, and the contract must be less than a year old" - "What do you mean, you need to replace a fuse? You can't do that, they're built-in. Please contact our office to buy a new house". - "Sure, our new Model T does 5 gallons to the mile, but look at its color! It's not just black, it's Vanta Black (tm)! And look at these rounded bumpers, aren't they a marvel of engineering?"

mbell 5y ago

"Any idiot can build a bridge that stands, but it takes an engineer to build a bridge that barely stands." - Someone

diordiderot 5y ago
Brilliant!
int0x2e 5y ago
Your quote is better, but for people that have a hard time with that analogy, I like using the example of building a 4-story concrete/brick building - anyone can make a building stand strong by filling it with concrete / bricks. It takes precise engineering to know how thin you can make the walls/supports to make that building worth building.
- filmor 5y ago
  If you just mindlessly fill everything with bricks and concrete, you likely need to make the lower walls thicker than the upper ones to support the weight... The whole engineering process can be done without ever looking at the budget as long as the framework is given ("use these materials", "you have this much space").
  - dmd 5y ago
    And who came up with that framework?
ahartmetz 5y ago
With different constraints... "The perfect race car crosses the finish line first and then completely disintegrates" - Ferdinand Porsche (I took some liberty with the translation - the idea is that everything breaks at the same time.)
- throw0101a 5y ago
  "The perfect racing car crosses the finish line first and subsequently falls into its component parts." ? * https://quotefancy.com/quote/1791488/Ferdinand-Porsche-The-perfect-racing-car-crosses-the-finish-line-first-and-subsequently https://quotefancy.com/quote/1791488/Ferdinand-Porsche-The-p...

Ultimatt 5y ago

Feels like everyone is very disinterested in the cost to the user with most "modern ways" of doing things. Many webpages use far too much resource to just communicate text. Web adverts are especially awful for this. I could browse the web with dialup and a machine a thousandth as powerful as my phone. So as a consumer why do I need to "upgrade" what was the added value above Google scale is delivering computationally intense adverts I then waste cycles blocking?

coliveira 5y ago
But the cost to the user is not considered, even in the real world. For example, transportation decisions are made in the airline industry, and they rarely consider how much this will financially impact the lives of passengers. The same pattern is replicated everywhere: companies work to maximize their profits, while their clients have to deal with possible financial losses.
emodendroket 5y ago
Of course they are, because the user does not reward them for being sparing of resources that are, frankly, insignificant on modern devices. Might be different in you were operating in a market where people were largely relying on very low-powered devices, though.
- tremon 5y ago
  That's a circular argument, because "on modern devices" moves the goalposts every year. I still have a Galaxy Note II, which I would definitively classify as a modern device. But some webpages have terrible performance on it, because anything older than 3 years is not worth optimizing for. Same thing with old iPhones: the only reason they don't work reliably today is because each piece of "modern software" is less efficient than yesteryear's equivalent, and the constant redefining of what constitutes a "modern device" is what perpetuates the problem. This isn't an engineering problem, it's a consumerist dystopia. The computing market is encouraging wastefulness in all dimensions: useful device lifetime, computing costs (bitcoin farming anyone?), software efficiency, framework longevity (jquery, angular, meteor, react), dependency management (NodeJS). None of those problems are new, but every new entrant seems hell-bent on outdoing the wastefulness of its previous incarnation.

2muchcoffeeman 5y ago

I wouldn’t be surprised if solving the problem with the Mayors constraints increased costs though. I have a few stories where senior management, or a preferred developer had some pet project. Or crazy ideology. So we adopted that dispute protests. If we picked a standard way we would have been done faster, cheaper and with fewer bugs.

rahimiali 5y ago

Ok. What is the art of building things that are good, but violate some constraints of the real world? I’d like to use the products from that discipline.

goto11 5y ago
> Ok. What is the art of building things that are good, but violate some constraints of the real world? Science fiction. Somebody designs user interfaces for use in Hollywood movies. They don't have to be practical or even feasible, they just have to look cool.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
lgessler 5y ago
Programming in Haskell. Jokes aside, do you really not understand what GP means? "Real-world constraints" are the things like having to make money or having to do something with only 2 other programmers to help you. Nobody's claiming that, for example, academics (who don't need to have products that money) don't have other problems (like grant writing or juggling academic responsibilities), but that isn't what people mean by "real-world constraints".
dragonwriter 5y ago
> What is the art of building things that are good, but violate some constraints of the real world? Magic.
masklinn 5y ago
> What is the art of building things that are good, but violate some constraints of the real world? “The romans were so much better at building stuff”. You could make buildings matching those, they’d be massively over-engineered and overpriced compared to the modern equivalent, and significantly more limited in suitable locations.

bryanrasmussen 5y ago

also within time constraints, building an electron app in the scenario outlined is probably a lot quicker. Normally building something quicker implies that later maintainability is adversely affected, but in this case the tradeoff is not time vs. maintainability, but time vs. performance. Performance has generally been getting the short end of the stick since early Windows days anyway when Gates had people build not for what a computer could handle when the application was built, but rather what it could handle a year down the road. >When you build software, you're not given 10 years, a research team and infinite money. So actually you don't need all that to identify when there is a bird in the picture anymore, what's the new bird in a picture requirement? https://xkcd.com/1425/ https://xkcd.com/1425/

CRConrad 5y ago
> also within time constraints, building an electron app in the scenario outlined is probably a lot quicker. But building it in Free Pascal/ Lazarus is (almost?) as portable across systems, probably at least as quick, and comes without all the horrendous overhead bloat.

tluyben2 5y ago

But you can do this satisfying requirements with different interpretations: here in HN we cry and whine when database queries are not efficient, when code is suboptimal, when sites are hacked and leak info and many more things. These things were all probably fine within the requirements. Just like this crap experience for the user with Electron. So where do I draw the line? And why?