Comment by noir_lord | Hacker News Reader

Comment by noir_lord | Hacker News Reader

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My boss is both understanding and willing to listen, after working with him for 6mths I really can't blame the system on him.

The out sourced developers however...very much yes I can.

Half the things do the wrong thing wrong, the other half is the wrong thing sorta working.

There was clearly no attempt to understand what the user wanted or any attempt to ask the simple questions like "Why do you want X, is X related to Y, would it be handy to pull in related Y for display X" beyond the terrible code quality (and database architecture, I wish I was kidding when I say it took 49 to 69s to search for a quote (I timed it on repeated runs), it now takes ~400-600ms and I still think that's too slow (and I search more things) there is just a complete lack of any thought/effort or consistency.

Even the tables aren't consistent across the system - sometimes click a row opens the related entity (with no indication that's what it does), sometimes there is a "view" button in the row on the right, sometimes on the left.

It's just pile after pile of UX disasters/architecture code disasters, no wonder the original lead dev came close to a nervous breakdown, I just don't think he was capable of dealing with a system of this complexity.

> There was clearly no attempt to understand what the user wanted or any attempt to ask the simple questions like "Why do you want X, is X related to Y, would it be handy to pull in related Y for display X"

Asking those questions is being obstructionist. Most end users don't understand the ramifications of what they are requesting. Explaining it all is an effort to bring them up to a level of education that would allow them to do your job. They pay _you_ to do your job and now you are just wasting everybody's time. Why do you have to make everything so complicated!? Why can't you just do what your told? Just add the button and stop asking questions!

It's so painful running into brick wall after brick wall of asking "Why do you want X and have you thought of the implications for Y, Z, and A-W?!", only to be met with sighs and eye rolls that we should just know and get it done. Blah. Bad day for me, I guess? I apologize.

A way to ask these questions that sometimes works better, is something like "can you explain the business value added by doing this, so that I can be sure my implementation achieves that?"

Asking "why X, why Y, why Z" can come off as challenging their knowledge, and questions like "would you also need W?" tend to get answered "yes, sounds good" so now you've just made more work for yourself.

> "can you explain the business value added by doing this, so that I can be sure my implementation achieves that?"

100% this - "Have you considered that our long lead times on inventory means we increase our holding costs?" is a good lead-in to exploring how to reduce that.

Borderline thread necro here but...

> "Have you considered that our long lead times on inventory means we increase our holding costs?"

What's frustrating about this is now we also have to understand the business overall, and that's kind of the problem in the first place: nobody has the patience to explain it.

So in addition to coming up to speed on whatever tech stack they have, we're going to have to find someone who understands and is capable of explaining the (sometimes completely foreign to us) business side of things and come up to speed on that too. That's a lot of ramp up time, especially when nobody wants to hand out raises and you're better off finding a new gig roughly every other year anyway.

I'm currently working somewhere with people that are great at explaining the business, and are willing to discuss at length the intricacies of how anything works at any time. The tech stack is abysmal, but being able to easily understand the business makes it worth dealing with the dumpster fire of a LoB app. I'd take it over the previous job, where we had greenfield project, bleeding edge tech, and money, but nobody could tell me how the hell the business worked...

I didn't wait for anyone to explain it to me, I went to the library and checked out a bunch of books they had on Supply Chain Management/Operations Management and Inventory Control and then read them.

That gave me enough of a grasp of the principles and more importantly the nomenclature that I could then talk to people in their language not mine.

To me it's a normalised series of tables to them it's WIP inventory.

One of the things DDD got right (if you remove the buzzword bingo/hype) was the idea of a 'common language'.

Unfortunately in my experience (couple of decades) most business people don't want a common language, they want you to understand theirs.

It is surprising how little theoretical knowledge people who work in a field use on a day to day basis.

> One of the things DDD got right (if you remove the buzzword bingo/hype) was the idea of a 'common language'.

> Unfortunately in my experience (couple of decades) most business people don't want a common language, they want you to understand theirs.

The “common language” of DDD was the language of the business domain, so that’s in line with DDD.

The practical problem is that the language of many business domains is often highly context dependent, making it unsuitable for direct use where ambiguity must be avoided even without context, and trying to namespace things to map to the specific relevant business contexts is often impractical.

Yep which comes back to 'no silver bullets'.

I've found it's easier to understand their domain and map it back to mine than it is to try to build a shared domain.

Also I find business stuff interesting, it's just a nice change of pace from fighting with code.

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