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I think sometimes it’s overcomplicated because there’s no one with sufficient authority to challenge the original framing of the problem and requirements, and p

I think sometimes it’s overcomplicated because there’s no one with sufficient authority to challenge the original framing of the problem and requirements, and part of the requirements/problem are in the hands of people who literally don’t know what they’re doing and may have misaligned incentives. For instance, I’m flying to the other side of the country with a team to do an experiment at a vendor’s location because the safety folks at my current location are inexperienced and are working with a contractor who has zero experience installing the appropriate safety equipment at my location and it has been stuck in discussion for about two years after the scope has increased an entire order of magnitude. One person with sufficient authority and courage could have cut the Gordian knot a year ago and improved the efficiency of the entire project a good order of magnitude.

yunwal 4y ago
This strikes me as the most common issue, along with the issue of the person defining the problem and requirements being erratic. Often people end up using versatile-but-complicated solutions because they're afraid the requirements will shift too much.
hbrn 4y ago
True. A lot of overcomplicated solutions start from good intentions. Funny thing is, I found it much easier to challenge the original framing with upper management than with my peers. - (me) Hey, if we sacrifice this feature, we can ship the whole thing twice a fast. - (ceo) Fuck yeah, lets do this. vs - (me) Hey, this seems to be solving a lot of the problems we don't have today, how about we keep it simple and leave only what matters? - (engineer) This is best practice, simpler solution is an anti-pattern. - (engineer) Google is doing it this way. Do you think you're smarter than Google? - (engineer) But I already built it, why change it to something inferior? - (engineer) My solution is very flexible, it allows changing database to a toaser with a simple configuration. It has unit-tests and mocks. Are you saying all of that was for nothing? And yeah, it's mostly misaligned incentives. Solving complex problems makes engineers happy. When we don't have complex problems, we invent them.

yunwal 4y ago

This strikes me as the most common issue, along with the issue of the person defining the problem and requirements being erratic. Often people end up using versatile-but-complicated solutions because they're afraid the requirements will shift too much.

hbrn 4y ago

True. A lot of overcomplicated solutions start from good intentions. Funny thing is, I found it much easier to challenge the original framing with upper management than with my peers. - (me) Hey, if we sacrifice this feature, we can ship the whole thing twice a fast. - (ceo) Fuck yeah, lets do this. vs - (me) Hey, this seems to be solving a lot of the problems we don't have today, how about we keep it simple and leave only what matters? - (engineer) This is best practice, simpler solution is an anti-pattern. - (engineer) Google is doing it this way. Do you think you're smarter than Google? - (engineer) But I already built it, why change it to something inferior? - (engineer) My solution is very flexible, it allows changing database to a toaser with a simple configuration. It has unit-tests and mocks. Are you saying all of that was for nothing? And yeah, it's mostly misaligned incentives. Solving complex problems makes engineers happy. When we don't have complex problems, we invent them.