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> PMs aren't usually accountable when their shortcuts come and bite the team further down the line. Developers feel the pain instead. Developers (and people in

> PMs aren't usually accountable when their shortcuts come and bite the team further down the line. Developers feel the pain instead. Developers (and people in general) are bad at prediction the future. I've seen many times that a developer are solving a problems in more generic and extensible form than required, creating a complex solution in hope that future changes will be easy. But then future comes not as it was expected and refactoring is required anyway. 80/20 for me includes not solving problems you don't have but think you may have in the future. If you need to solve X and X looks like a special case if Y class it doesn't necessary mean solving more generic but bigger and harder problem Y is a good idea.

Aeolun 4y ago
> Developers (and people in general) are bad at prediction the future. Right now I can safely say that 80% of the times I foresee changes they actually happen. I won’t stop pre-empting stuff for the 20% I get wrong.
- lowercased 4y ago
  Similar here. That's not always the case, but usually after some period - 6 months min - I have as strong an understanding of the business needs as someone can have (with the exception of information which is explicitly hidden or withheld). From then on, my notion of what's needed now and in the future is generally pretty strong (and, to be honest, for many types of businesses, there's a lot of relatively generic plumbing and data needs that are evergreen). I've been in software engineering for closing in on 30 years (first got paid for a small piece of freelance code in 1994!). I've been doing this longer than some of my colleagues have been adults, much less been in their positions in company X. Many items and needs are not that hard to foresee/predict. Worked short term on a financial tool - dealing with mortgages, assets, etc. Field for recording "interest rate" would not accept negative rate. I raised it as a concern. "What do you mean? You can't have negative interest rates - that doesn't make any sense!" This was in 2018, where many European banks were starting to come to terms with negative interest rates. The company itself had funding from a large investor, and one of the stated goals was that the product was planning to be rolled out in Europe by 2020 (covid happened and I'm sure scuttled much of that). Understanding that interest rates can, in fact, be negative, doesn't require some fancy economics degree. You could just go to yahoo finance and read news headlines that it was happening. And... we had to create entity records representing a bank - name, address, contact info, etc. Nothing crazy, but "we need to handle multiple currencies". Someone added "currency" as the field for the bank - a one-to-one only. I raised the issue that large international banks can and do deal with multiple currencies. I got some blank stares, and a "banks don't do that" from some project lead. 2 months later, demoing for one of the VPs... a VP said "these bank records should be able to have more than one currency associated". "Yes sir, we'll get right on it!". Ugh... But hey, I'm just a developer, right? It's better to go back and tear up months of work and tests, and push back release dates, than to just listen to a concern from someone with some experience. "For v1, we only support single currencies. Multi currency records are on the roadmap for v2 in Q3" or "We prevent negative interest rates on purpose and will notify the user that negative rates will require a call to support team" or similar responses - both would have been mildly annoying, but I felt like I was being gaslit by folks in the company, intimating that normal/basic stuff was just random stuff I was making up.
- michaelcampbell 4y ago
  It couldn't possibly be that you remember 80% of the things you foresaw that happened vs. the ones that didn't.
  - Aeolun 4y ago
    I’m fairly certain it’s above 50%, otherwise I wouldn’t have that feeling. 80 just makes for a good number because we were talking about 80/20. It’s also possible I have a selective memory, but I imagine I’d be a bit different if it often came back to bite me in the ass.

Aeolun 4y ago

> Developers (and people in general) are bad at prediction the future. Right now I can safely say that 80% of the times I foresee changes they actually happen. I won’t stop pre-empting stuff for the 20% I get wrong.

lowercased 4y ago
Similar here. That's not always the case, but usually after some period - 6 months min - I have as strong an understanding of the business needs as someone can have (with the exception of information which is explicitly hidden or withheld). From then on, my notion of what's needed now and in the future is generally pretty strong (and, to be honest, for many types of businesses, there's a lot of relatively generic plumbing and data needs that are evergreen). I've been in software engineering for closing in on 30 years (first got paid for a small piece of freelance code in 1994!). I've been doing this longer than some of my colleagues have been adults, much less been in their positions in company X. Many items and needs are not that hard to foresee/predict. Worked short term on a financial tool - dealing with mortgages, assets, etc. Field for recording "interest rate" would not accept negative rate. I raised it as a concern. "What do you mean? You can't have negative interest rates - that doesn't make any sense!" This was in 2018, where many European banks were starting to come to terms with negative interest rates. The company itself had funding from a large investor, and one of the stated goals was that the product was planning to be rolled out in Europe by 2020 (covid happened and I'm sure scuttled much of that). Understanding that interest rates can, in fact, be negative, doesn't require some fancy economics degree. You could just go to yahoo finance and read news headlines that it was happening. And... we had to create entity records representing a bank - name, address, contact info, etc. Nothing crazy, but "we need to handle multiple currencies". Someone added "currency" as the field for the bank - a one-to-one only. I raised the issue that large international banks can and do deal with multiple currencies. I got some blank stares, and a "banks don't do that" from some project lead. 2 months later, demoing for one of the VPs... a VP said "these bank records should be able to have more than one currency associated". "Yes sir, we'll get right on it!". Ugh... But hey, I'm just a developer, right? It's better to go back and tear up months of work and tests, and push back release dates, than to just listen to a concern from someone with some experience. "For v1, we only support single currencies. Multi currency records are on the roadmap for v2 in Q3" or "We prevent negative interest rates on purpose and will notify the user that negative rates will require a call to support team" or similar responses - both would have been mildly annoying, but I felt like I was being gaslit by folks in the company, intimating that normal/basic stuff was just random stuff I was making up.
michaelcampbell 4y ago
It couldn't possibly be that you remember 80% of the things you foresaw that happened vs. the ones that didn't.
- Aeolun 4y ago
  I’m fairly certain it’s above 50%, otherwise I wouldn’t have that feeling. 80 just makes for a good number because we were talking about 80/20. It’s also possible I have a selective memory, but I imagine I’d be a bit different if it often came back to bite me in the ass.