3 ms·

> Someone tells you to build XYZ, and you have NIH syndrome and build dependencies yourself, you will do so under a lot of time pressure, and it will be shit no

> Someone tells you to build XYZ, and you have NIH syndrome and build dependencies yourself, you will do so under a lot of time pressure, and it will be shit no matter how good you are. It can go both ways though. You have the opposite of NIH, and say "there's no way in hell I have time to build this", so you pull in some huge unwieldy library that mostly solves the problem, and end up spending more time jamming a circle into a square hole and plugging up the gaps than you would have spent just solving the problem.

brundolf 4y ago
Yeah. Usually the cost of adding a dependency is over the long-run, so it disappears in the near-term decision making, but sometimes it's so significant it shows up in the near-term. It's good to notice when that's going to be the case and point it out to those applying the pressure, because that will be in a language they'll hopefully understand
rqtwteye 4y ago
You see that a lot with some enterprise software. They get you started quickly but then you spend enormous amounts of time and energy customizing it to achieve the last few percent of functionality.
- vsareto 4y ago
  >They get you started quickly but then you spend enormous amounts of time and energy customizing it to achieve the last few percent of functionality. This is a good time to push back on requirements unless there's real money waiting to pay for that feature. Usually things are not completely established up front, so you never have a good picture of things you're going to have to build with some dependency. In these situations, your choice of software and how well it supports future features may as well be a dice roll.
  - ramesh31 4y ago
    >In these situations, your choice of software and how well it supports future features may as well be a dice roll. It's definitely a judgement call, and that's where having the experience to make that call correctly can save a ton of headache down the road. Some times YJGWI (You Just Gotta Write It).
deterministic 4y ago
Yep. This always happens in my experience. Or there is a bug fix or feature you badly need and it will never happen for various BS reasons. So now you either have to rip out the dependency and start all over or start maintaining a massive pile of garbage software that you didn’t even write (assuming you can even get access to the code).

brundolf 4y ago

Yeah. Usually the cost of adding a dependency is over the long-run, so it disappears in the near-term decision making, but sometimes it's so significant it shows up in the near-term. It's good to notice when that's going to be the case and point it out to those applying the pressure, because that will be in a language they'll hopefully understand

rqtwteye 4y ago

You see that a lot with some enterprise software. They get you started quickly but then you spend enormous amounts of time and energy customizing it to achieve the last few percent of functionality.

vsareto 4y ago
>They get you started quickly but then you spend enormous amounts of time and energy customizing it to achieve the last few percent of functionality. This is a good time to push back on requirements unless there's real money waiting to pay for that feature. Usually things are not completely established up front, so you never have a good picture of things you're going to have to build with some dependency. In these situations, your choice of software and how well it supports future features may as well be a dice roll.
- ramesh31 4y ago
  >In these situations, your choice of software and how well it supports future features may as well be a dice roll. It's definitely a judgement call, and that's where having the experience to make that call correctly can save a ton of headache down the road. Some times YJGWI (You Just Gotta Write It).

deterministic 4y ago

Yep. This always happens in my experience. Or there is a bug fix or feature you badly need and it will never happen for various BS reasons. So now you either have to rip out the dependency and start all over or start maintaining a massive pile of garbage software that you didn’t even write (assuming you can even get access to the code).