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A bit late reply here, so I don't know if you'll see it. But, how sure are you that it was done intentionally? Incompetence is pretty is to argue, but intention

A bit late reply here, so I don't know if you'll see it. But, how sure are you that it was done intentionally? Incompetence is pretty is to argue, but intentionally making something bad?

jiggawatts 3y ago
The extremely vehement push-back after any suggestion of using less code[1] in the future. Any talk of efficiency or lean techniques were instantly shut down, with a distinct undertone of nervousness. As in: “He knows! We’ve been found out!” For reference this is in public service where it’s easy to get away with this kind of thing, even for decades or until retirement. To clarify: this is the softest form of corruption. There’s no brown paper bags with wads of cash in them exchanging hands. It’s a passive exploit of a disinterested organisation with too much money that’s happy to pay for developers to write verbose code for years on end with no business purpose. [1] To put some numbers against this: recently I was tasked with migrating a data feed API to the cloud. It has about six Visual Studio projects: multiple tiers of APIs calling each other over the network. Roughly 3K likes of incredibly repetitive code written by hand. I replaced it with 70 lines of code. It was faster to do that than to write the infrastructure templates for such a complex architecture.
- okamiueru 3y ago
  Thanks. I appreciate the reply. In my experience, incompetence has been the underlying cause for a lot that seems like malice or something more deliberate. Especially when combined with social aspects like not wanting to lose face, or having an ego. I suppose that the transition between incompetence and malice isn't exactly black and white either, or mutually exclusive for that matter. I've seen complacency too. People who know better, but instead of arguing that point, they go along the path of least resistance. "I get my paycheck either way"-kind of mindset. I have yet to experience someone deliberately turning 70 lines of code into 3k lines. But, I've certainly seen that exact same thing happen. Almost surprising how similar it sounds. I should check how many lines it is, but if I would guess, it was 1k lines of code that could be done in 10. Which is what you get when you manually write a API client and objects, and you've split out the 10 lines of code into 4 separate micro-services (this isn't an exaggeration). I'm 99% sure that this was a case of not understanding why it was a terrible approach, and it being driven by consultants who are happy to explore some unsuited approach just for the CV-padding of it, if nothing else. Deliberate feigned incompetence to make a problem worse, or job safety. I've yet to actually experience and confirm this for myself. What you describe as "He knows! We've been found out!" might be entirely true, but it could also reflect being found out as in the impostor syndrome.. or "... that we have no clue", etc.

A bit late reply here, so I don't know if you'll see it. But, how sure are you that it was done intentionally? Incompetence is pretty is to argue, but intentionally making something bad?

jiggawatts 3y ago

The extremely vehement push-back after any suggestion of using less code[1] in the future. Any talk of efficiency or lean techniques were instantly shut down, with a distinct undertone of nervousness. As in: “He knows! We’ve been found out!” For reference this is in public service where it’s easy to get away with this kind of thing, even for decades or until retirement. To clarify: this is the softest form of corruption. There’s no brown paper bags with wads of cash in them exchanging hands. It’s a passive exploit of a disinterested organisation with too much money that’s happy to pay for developers to write verbose code for years on end with no business purpose. [1] To put some numbers against this: recently I was tasked with migrating a data feed API to the cloud. It has about six Visual Studio projects: multiple tiers of APIs calling each other over the network. Roughly 3K likes of incredibly repetitive code written by hand. I replaced it with 70 lines of code. It was faster to do that than to write the infrastructure templates for such a complex architecture.

okamiueru 3y ago
Thanks. I appreciate the reply. In my experience, incompetence has been the underlying cause for a lot that seems like malice or something more deliberate. Especially when combined with social aspects like not wanting to lose face, or having an ego. I suppose that the transition between incompetence and malice isn't exactly black and white either, or mutually exclusive for that matter. I've seen complacency too. People who know better, but instead of arguing that point, they go along the path of least resistance. "I get my paycheck either way"-kind of mindset. I have yet to experience someone deliberately turning 70 lines of code into 3k lines. But, I've certainly seen that exact same thing happen. Almost surprising how similar it sounds. I should check how many lines it is, but if I would guess, it was 1k lines of code that could be done in 10. Which is what you get when you manually write a API client and objects, and you've split out the 10 lines of code into 4 separate micro-services (this isn't an exaggeration). I'm 99% sure that this was a case of not understanding why it was a terrible approach, and it being driven by consultants who are happy to explore some unsuited approach just for the CV-padding of it, if nothing else. Deliberate feigned incompetence to make a problem worse, or job safety. I've yet to actually experience and confirm this for myself. What you describe as "He knows! We've been found out!" might be entirely true, but it could also reflect being found out as in the impostor syndrome.. or "... that we have no clue", etc.