9 ms·

The author hits the nail on the head with his claim that imaginary problems are more fun than real ones. As developers and smart folks in general, we like comp

• icedchai 3y ago
  Reminds me of a PM I used to work with. "Will this work for 1000 simultaneous users?" After almost 2 months, we have less than 100 users total, maybe 5 of them log in a day, and maybe 1 will actually do anything of interest. There is no technical problem. The problem is nobody worked on actually marketing the product. Build it and nobody shows up is the norm.
  • mnd999 3y ago
    I’ve worked somewhere like that. Our baseline requirements for concurrent users were based on the numbers required for the product launch team to maximise their bonus. We never saw anywhere near those numbers in production, but I don’t really blame them - it was a big company and you do what you can to get ahead. A lot of money was spent on infrastructure that wasn’t needed but nobody seemed to care.
  • codegeek 3y ago
    ""Will this work for 1000 simultaneous users?"" Whenever someone asks me this question, I reply with a question "How many simultaneous users do you/we have today and what is our projection say for 12-18 months from now ?". If the answer is not clear, I tell them not to worry yet. If the answer is very clear but numbers are much smaller today (say 5-10), then I challenge them on where they think they/we could be in 12-18 months. A lot of times, it helps the other side see that they are mostly asking "How long is a piece of string".
  • TuringNYC 3y ago
    I was interviewing with a company that had barely any customers and they were asking scaling questions with Spark, etc. The salaries they paid could barely hire a team capable of dealing with the complexities of Spark, so they asked, "what would you do." I told them I'd buy another stick of RAM and scale vertically until I had more customers, and save money on staff in the meantime. The interviewer went cold, I didnt get the job.
    • baq 3y ago
      Sounds like a dodged bullet.
    • icedchai 3y ago
      About 10 years ago, I worked on a project where I had to develop some sort of elaborate chain of map/reduce jobs because "big data" and "Hadoop." We were processing about 10 megabytes for each run. Most of the processing was consumed in job scheduling / overhead.
• tetha 3y ago
  And people underestimate how well some solid, dumb solutions can scale. Boring spring boot with a decent data model and a bit effort to stay stateless scales to the moon. Or, we're having a grand "data export" system customers use to collect data from us for their own DWHs. It has survived 2 attempts at replacement so far. At it's core, it's psql + rsync, or was recently migrated to psql + s3 when we decomissioned our FTP servers. And it's easy to extend and customers are happy because it integrates well.
  • tyingq 3y ago
    Yep. Facebook got pretty far down the road with PHP, MySQL, memcached, etc.
    • fauigerzigerk 3y ago
      All they had to do was write a PHP compiler and a new storage engine for MySQL.
      • tyingq 3y ago
        HipHop (later HHVM) was around 2010, so they scaled from 2004-2010 before that became needed. MyRocks was 2015. Wikipedia says FB was around 300 million users in 2009, then 400 million users in 2010.
        • fauigerzigerk 3y ago
          Yes, good point. But you have to wonder what kind of engineering effort went into scaling PHP and MySQL up to the point where they decided to build a compiler and a storage engine.
          • rafark 3y ago
            When you have half a billion users that both read and write all day, you have to optimize, no matter the tech.
• Dudester230602 3y ago
  Reddit has 1M users and is half-broken, yet monetization is still a problem.
  • eddythompson80 3y ago
    Reddit has 1M users? Where are you getting that from? The only sources I could find suggest 50M daily users, 400M monthly users. https://thehill.com/business/despite-widespread-protest-reddit-ceo-says-company-is-not-negotiating-on-changes-to-data-access/ https://thehill.com/business/despite-widespread-protest-redd... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reddit https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reddit https://backlinko.com/reddit-users https://backlinko.com/reddit-users https://www.oberlo.com/blog/reddit-statistics https://www.oberlo.com/blog/reddit-statistics https://www.businessofapps.com/data/reddit-statistics/ https://www.businessofapps.com/data/reddit-statistics/
    • Dudester230602 3y ago
      1M+ was implied. I am sorry I forced you to go on a stats-collection side quest.
      • eddythompson80 3y ago
        So what’s your point exactly? The type of problems you have to solve for 1M users is completely different than 500M users including profitability.
• tracerbulletx 3y ago
  This is why I think running a small business was the best thing I ever did for my software career.
  • neon_electro 3y ago
    How do you manage sales?
• deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
• _fat_santa 3y ago
  As a solo dev on a project, I constantly re-evaluate whether the thing I am working on is beneficial to my users or if it's an "imaginary problem" as this post describes. In a large software project you always have a laundry list of things to do from: "fix the date format on this email template" to "implement a better feature flag system". While I'm tempted to always work on the "fun stuff" (the feature flag system), I make myself work on the "boring stuff" (fixing the date format on an email template) because I know that's what users need. Occasionally you get an intersection where the cool fun an interesting problem is also the most pressing one but I found those times are few and far between and most times I have to decide between the "cool fun [imaginary] problem" and "the boring [real] problem".
• mkl95 3y ago
  I recently added a couple of constants to some project. One of my teammates said it wasn't a good idea, because we could have hundreds of similar constants eventually. Those constants represent the markets supported by that app. By the time the app supports even a few dozen markets, every engineer involved will have exercised their stock options and left.
• muskmusk 3y ago
  > The author hits the nail on the head with his claim that imaginary problems are more fun than real ones. Not necessarily. It's just that most developers have never worked in a setting where they got to work on problems properly. Solving real problems for real people is very addictive. There is a reason some people like working for startups. It's because you live very close to your users and when you make them happy you know. The second interesting fact is that if you just plow ahead and solve many real problems fast you will eventually run into problems that are both real and interesting. After having tried that there has been no going back for me. I am allergic to imaginary problems. It feels as pointless as watching people who are famous for being famous argue on TV. I think we are all victims of our feedback loops. (University) Education sublely teaches us that the only important problems are those that are very difficult and preferably have never been solved before. Those same problems also make for better blogposts. In the real world the incentives are mostly opposite. Problems with no known solutions (or only really difficult solutions) are generally bad. They can be worth it, but you should stay away from them until you know that are worth it. Software engineers seem to almost pride themselves on not knowing what their users want. It takes a while to scrub all that bad learning out and replace it with something better. Unfortunately some people are stuck.
  • sliechty 3y ago
    > Solving real problems for real people is very addictive. This was the feedback loop that worked best for me. imaginary problems and needless complexity go hand in hand, ruthless editing at the planning stage is necessary to combat it.
  • TehShrike 3y ago
    Second this. The endorphins from making someone's job less sucky are a way better high than solving some code puzzle.
  • nr378 3y ago
    > (University) Education sublely teaches us that the only important problems are those that are very difficult and preferably have never been solved before. Those same problems also make for better blogposts. In the real world the incentives are mostly opposite. Problems with no known solutions (or only really difficult solutions) are generally bad. This is a great insight. One can add value to other people's lives by applying known solutions in relatively novel contexts (e.g. building a CRUD form at XYZ employer), whereas it's very hard to add value to other people's lives by trying to develop entirely novel solutions (because the probability of success is so low). Most of our training however, focuses on the methodology used to develop these novel solutions, rather than on the application of the solutions themselves.
• paleotrope 3y ago
  I am dealing with that today. Talking about scaling out to hundreds if not thousands of aws accounts and I'm like, "we've added 6? in two years?" Why are we wasting time on this?
• TillE 3y ago
  I remember having a similar argument with someone saying that your C code has to compile and work on every platform that exists, including weird CPUs with known bugs. Unless you're working on something like the Linux kernel, that's an imaginary problem.
  • lmm 3y ago
    "Newer versions of the compiler build your code with security vulnerabilities" is a very real problem in C. E.g. since x86_64 has no aligned memory access instructions, a lot of programmers assume there's nothing wrong with doing unaligned memory accesses, but actually recent gcc/clang will happily compile those into RCE vulnerabilities.
• chefandy 3y ago
  I worked with a project manager that went too far in the opposite direction, though. Their pushback against premature optimization manifested in wanting to start with a functionalish "proof of concept" without any real design phase so they can say we cranked out an MVP in the first sprint... and before you know it, like most non-blocking technical debt, the "migrate functionality to final codebase" kanban card moves to the "long term goals" column (aka trash) and you're stuck with a shitty, fragile producion codebase. The opposite side— trying to get everything into a final state right off the bat— it is like trying to play an entire 8 measure song in one measure. At the beginning of a project, before I write a line of code, I try to: a) if it's user-facing software, get some UI designer input to shape functionality/interactions, not styling. To end users, the UI is the software, not just the shell, so mediocre UI = mediocre software. It can also illuminate needs you didn't consider that affect architecture, etc.; then b) block out the broad stroke architecture, usually on paper, c) intentionally choose languages/environments/tooling/etc rather than reflexively going with whatever we've been using recently, and d) spend some design time on a reasonably sane and extensible, but not overly detailed data model. There's no perfect solution, but at least in my cases, it seems like a good middle ground.
  • jtriangle 3y ago
    The trouble is, an 'MVP' is often far from 'minimum' in those sorts of situations. The reality is that MVP should be missing most planned functionality and should really just be a few core features and functions that the rest of the application builds off of, the trunk of the dependency tree so to speak. That idea is, unfortunately lost on the majority of PM's, and ultimately it costs more time/money to get to a finished v1 because of it.
    • chefandy 3y ago
      It was actually the appropriate scope for an mvp, it was just an unreasonable time frame to make a solid codebase for anything other than a demo for the complexity of the project. That's fine for a genuine proof of concept/rapid prototype you're going to be disciplined enough to trash, but letting that slip into the role of your core codebase is like pouring a sloppy scaled-down concrete foundation as a test for a house, and then trying to just expand it into what you need.
• qaq 3y ago
  Now you have a whole bunch of New SQL databases that will scale past whatever number of users you can imagine. So your good old Django or Rails app can scale to 1M or 10M users without you doing anything exotic. That's not "fun" though.
  • wasimanitoba 3y ago
    I wonder if you've ever seen this classic video mocking such marketing claims which is called "MongoDB is Web Scale": https://youtu.be/b2F-DItXtZs https://youtu.be/b2F-DItXtZs
    • qaq 3y ago
      Have you ever seen Spanner? things don't stay static. And yes I have seen those vidoes since I've being doing web dev since 1999.
• astrobe_ 3y ago
  Not the first time the issue has been pointed out: > Simplify the problem you've got or rather don't complexify it. I've done it myself, it's fun to do. You have a boring problem and hiding behind it is a much more interesting problem. So you code the more interesting problem and the one you've got is a subset of it and it falls out trivial. But of course you wrote ten times as much code as you needed to solve the problem that you actually had. [1] http://www.ultratechnology.com/1xforth.htm http://www.ultratechnology.com/1xforth.htm
• Cthulhu_ 3y ago
  I think this is an attitude shift that a lot of developers need to get over. They like writing code, they like working with computers, and they pick that to do as their day job. But their day job actually isn't writing code, it's solving a problem for an end-user; the programming language is just a tool. Rethink your job from a coder to a problem solver and you should be able to get over the compulsion to overcomplicate things for your own gratification.