4 ms·

"It seems most of teams I've been on value speed over future proofing bugs." So, obviously, if one team is future proofing bugs, and the other team just blasts

by jerf 2y ago

"It seems most of teams I've been on value speed over future proofing bugs." So, obviously, if one team is future proofing bugs, and the other team just blasts out localized short-term fixes as quickly as possible, there will come a point where the first team will overtake the second, because the second team's velocity will by necessity has to slow down more than the first as the code base grows. If the crossover point is ten years hence, then it only makes sense to be the second team. However, what I find a bit horrifying as a developer is that my estimate of the crossover point keeps coming in. When I'm working by myself on greenfield code, I'd put it at about three weeks; yes, I'll go somewhat faster today if I just blast out code and skip the unit tests, but it's only weeks before I'm getting bitten by that. Bigger teams may have a somewhat farther cross over point, but it's still likely to be small single-digit months. There is of course overdoing it and being too perfectionist, and that does get some people, but the people, teams, managers, and companies who always vote for the short term code blasting simply have no idea how much performance they are leaving on the table almost immediately. Established code bases are slower to turn, naturally. But even so, I still think the constant short-term focus is vastly more expensive than those who choose it understand. And I don't even mean obvious stuff like "oh, you'll have more bugs" or "oh, it's so much harder to on board", even if that's true... no, I mean, even by the only metric you seem care about, the team that takes the time to fix fundamental issues and invests in better logging and metrics and all those things you think just slow you down can also smoke you on dev speed after a couple of months... and they'll have the solid code base, too! "Make sure the project runs but has error, code smells, etc." It is a hard problem to construct a test for this but it would be interesting to provide the candidate some code that compiles with warnings and just watch them react to the warnings. You may not learn everything you need but it'll certainly teach you something.

daelon 2y ago
Slow is smooth, smooth is fast.
ozim 2y ago
Unfortunately I believe there is no crossing point even in 10 years. If quick fix works it is most likely a proper fix, if it doesn’t work then you dig deeper. It is also case if feature to be fixed is even worth spending so much time.
- rocqua 2y ago
  A quick fix works now. It makes the next fix or change much harder because it just added a special case, or ignored an edge case that wasn't possible in the configuration at that time.
  - ozim 2y ago
    My main point is That’s false dichotomy. There is bunch of stuff that could be “fixed better” or “properly” if someone took a better look but also a lot of times it is just good enough and is not somehow magically impeding proper fix.
    - jerf 2y ago
      It is and it isn't a false dichotomy. It is a false dichotomy in that in the Aristotelian sense of "X -> Y" means that absolutely, positively every X must with 100% probability lead to Y, it is absolutely true that "This is a quick fix -> This not the best fix" is false. Sometimes the quick fix is correct. A quick example: I'm doing some math of some sort and literally typed minus instead of plus. The quick fix to change minus to plus is reasonable. (If you're wondering about testing, well, let's say I wrote unit tests to assert the wrong code. I've written plenty of unit tests that turn out to be asserting the wrong thing. So the quick fix may involve fixing those too.) It is true in the sense that if you plot the quickness of the fix versus the correctness of the fix, you're not going to get a perfectly uniformly random two dimensional graph that would indicate they are uncorrelated. You'll get some sort of Pareto-optimal[1] front that will develop, becoming more pronounced as the problem and minimum size fix become larger (and they can get pretty large in programming). It'll be a bit loose, you'll get occasional outliers where you have otherwise fantastic code that just happened to have this tiny screw loose that caused a lot of problems everywhere and one quick fix can fix a lot of issues at once; I think a lot of us will see those once or twice a decade or so, but for the most part, there will develop a definite trend that once you eliminate all the fixes that are neither terribly fast nor terribly good for the long term, there will develop a fairly normal "looks like 1/x" curve of tradeoffs between speed and long-term value. This is a very common pattern across many combinations of X and Y that don't literally, 100% oppose each other, but in the real world, with many complicated interrelated factors interacting with each other and many different distributions of effort and value interacting, do contradict each other... but only if you are actually on the Pareto frontier! For practical purposes in this case I think we usually are, at least relative to the local developers fixing the bug; nobody deliberately sets out to make a fix that is visibly obviously harder than it needs to be and less long-term valuable than it needs to be. My favorite "false dichotomy" that arises is the supposed contradiction between security and usability. It's true they oppose each other... but only if your program is already roughly optimally usable and secure on the Pareto frontier and now you really can't improve one without diminishing the other. Most programs aren't actually there, and thus there are both usability and security improvements that can be made without affecting the other. I'm posting this because this is one of those things that sounds really academic and abstruse and irrelevant, but if you learn to see it, becomes very practical and powerful for your own engineering. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pareto_front https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pareto_front
marcosdumay 2y ago
My impression is that bigger teams have a shorter crossover point. Weirdly, teams seem to adapt better to bad code. But that adaptation occurs through meetings. And meetings just destroy a team productivity.
- carlmr 2y ago
  >Weirdly, teams seem to adapt better to bad code. The greenfield team usually adapts well to its own buggy code. They know the system so well inside-out that if a bug pops up they have a general idea why. This is bad, because with natural fluctuation in team members this institutional knowledge is lost. New members don't have the benefit of knowing about the whole evolution with all its quirks, and don't have the unit tests from the previous team to prevent regressions. This then slows velocity to near zero as the team gets replaced, and leads to the inevitable rewrite.
  - marcosdumay 2y ago
    My experience is that people adapt differently to different issues, so in a team people can specialize better on the types of bad code they handle best. So the code quality degrades less their productivity while they are working than if each person had to deal with the entire diversity alone. But that implies on a division of work that is not aligned with any communication-reducing objective.

by jerf 2y ago

daelon 2y ago

Slow is smooth, smooth is fast.

ozim 2y ago

Unfortunately I believe there is no crossing point even in 10 years. If quick fix works it is most likely a proper fix, if it doesn’t work then you dig deeper. It is also case if feature to be fixed is even worth spending so much time.

rocqua 2y ago
A quick fix works now. It makes the next fix or change much harder because it just added a special case, or ignored an edge case that wasn't possible in the configuration at that time.
- ozim 2y ago
  My main point is That’s false dichotomy. There is bunch of stuff that could be “fixed better” or “properly” if someone took a better look but also a lot of times it is just good enough and is not somehow magically impeding proper fix.
  - jerf 2y ago
    It is and it isn't a false dichotomy. It is a false dichotomy in that in the Aristotelian sense of "X -> Y" means that absolutely, positively every X must with 100% probability lead to Y, it is absolutely true that "This is a quick fix -> This not the best fix" is false. Sometimes the quick fix is correct. A quick example: I'm doing some math of some sort and literally typed minus instead of plus. The quick fix to change minus to plus is reasonable. (If you're wondering about testing, well, let's say I wrote unit tests to assert the wrong code. I've written plenty of unit tests that turn out to be asserting the wrong thing. So the quick fix may involve fixing those too.) It is true in the sense that if you plot the quickness of the fix versus the correctness of the fix, you're not going to get a perfectly uniformly random two dimensional graph that would indicate they are uncorrelated. You'll get some sort of Pareto-optimal[1] front that will develop, becoming more pronounced as the problem and minimum size fix become larger (and they can get pretty large in programming). It'll be a bit loose, you'll get occasional outliers where you have otherwise fantastic code that just happened to have this tiny screw loose that caused a lot of problems everywhere and one quick fix can fix a lot of issues at once; I think a lot of us will see those once or twice a decade or so, but for the most part, there will develop a definite trend that once you eliminate all the fixes that are neither terribly fast nor terribly good for the long term, there will develop a fairly normal "looks like 1/x" curve of tradeoffs between speed and long-term value. This is a very common pattern across many combinations of X and Y that don't literally, 100% oppose each other, but in the real world, with many complicated interrelated factors interacting with each other and many different distributions of effort and value interacting, do contradict each other... but only if you are actually on the Pareto frontier! For practical purposes in this case I think we usually are, at least relative to the local developers fixing the bug; nobody deliberately sets out to make a fix that is visibly obviously harder than it needs to be and less long-term valuable than it needs to be. My favorite "false dichotomy" that arises is the supposed contradiction between security and usability. It's true they oppose each other... but only if your program is already roughly optimally usable and secure on the Pareto frontier and now you really can't improve one without diminishing the other. Most programs aren't actually there, and thus there are both usability and security improvements that can be made without affecting the other. I'm posting this because this is one of those things that sounds really academic and abstruse and irrelevant, but if you learn to see it, becomes very practical and powerful for your own engineering. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pareto_front https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pareto_front

marcosdumay 2y ago

My impression is that bigger teams have a shorter crossover point. Weirdly, teams seem to adapt better to bad code. But that adaptation occurs through meetings. And meetings just destroy a team productivity.

carlmr 2y ago
>Weirdly, teams seem to adapt better to bad code. The greenfield team usually adapts well to its own buggy code. They know the system so well inside-out that if a bug pops up they have a general idea why. This is bad, because with natural fluctuation in team members this institutional knowledge is lost. New members don't have the benefit of knowing about the whole evolution with all its quirks, and don't have the unit tests from the previous team to prevent regressions. This then slows velocity to near zero as the team gets replaced, and leads to the inevitable rewrite.
- marcosdumay 2y ago
  My experience is that people adapt differently to different issues, so in a team people can specialize better on the types of bad code they handle best. So the code quality degrades less their productivity while they are working than if each person had to deal with the entire diversity alone. But that implies on a division of work that is not aligned with any communication-reducing objective.