4 ms·

I'm sure there are lots of large groups of devs who are undone by an upstart kid with a fresh perspective and no fear

• josephg 2y ago
  Can confirm. I've been on both sides of that fence. I worked on a product about a decade ago which had an unnecessarily complicated custom layout system written in javascript. CSS was missing a lot of features at the time, so we figured we'd roll our own. It was crazy complicated - and it had all these weird easy to reproduce bugs. For fun, some pesky kid on twitter took our insanely layout system and reimplemented 95% of it in a couple hundred lines of (almost) pure CSS. At a glance, it looked identical to our product - but the code was small, clean and fast. The link got passed around the office. It was amazing how many reasons people had to dismiss it. "Ah, see - it doesn't even do this weird custom behaviour we have!" or "Well and good in chrome - but it doesn't work properly on IE8!" and so on. I've never seen a better example of motivated reasoning, before or since. What we should have done is reach out and offer that kid a job. The smartest programmer on your team isn't as smart as the smartest programmer on the internet.
  • seba_dos1 2y ago
    All you have said is that it's easy to write something that takes you 90% there and ignores the last 10% of requirements. I worked in webdev some 15 years ago and if I could have dropped IE support sooner my code would have been so much simpler as well :)
  • skhr0680 2y ago
    > 95% I feel like the naysayers have a point too. 95% done? Only 95% left to go!