This is awesome. I don't know how many times I've seen over engineering in the field. It's crazy. Well we may one day want to do X.
Good product managers focus the team on revenue and customers. Bad product managers focus team on how many features Microsoft is building. Good product managers define good products that can be executed with a strong effort. Bad product managers define good products that can’t be executed or let engineering build whatever they want (i.e. solve the hardest problem).
As an engineer, I want to find the demons that are out there in the problem space and assault them, I want to eliminate all weakness from my precious software. But from the business POV I know we need to provide value to customers quickly and efficiently with the available resources, which is usually not the same thing.
Baloney :-) They design things they imagine are elegant. Nobody agrees with them.
My take is anybody can design something complicated. It takes genius to design something simple. (and elegance comes from simplicity)
The real world is messy, ugly, full of edge cases, and convoluted.
An elegant solution will solve 70% maybe 80% of the problem, but never all of it.
Realy great engineering, which I feel I have yet to achieve, is managing that complexity and this edge cases and the mess that is the "real world" in a way that is maintainable and manageable and works for all.
I think you've made a "No true Scotsman" statement, in other words - just swapping "elegant" for "Scotsman."
Elegant is a superset of effectiveness.
Also, side note, I would be happy to never see this “No True Scotsman” argument ever again. 9 times out of 10 it’s just used to demonize ideas: “Your idea was used in this horrible way once”/“That mistake is not inherent to the idea”/“No true Scotsman!” That’s not what you did here. So you’re the 10th. But my point is it’s just used as a rhetorical trick, from what I’ve seen.
.... eh ? what weird definition of elegance are you using ?
Say the problem is driving a nail into a wall for hanging up a picture.
In this case:
Elegant = solution is a glass cube
Efficient = solution is gasoline-powered nail driver which drives 1000 nails per minute
Effective = solution is hammer
Likewise, I think of efficiency as the resources used to accomplish something. While a nail driver would be fast, it isn't really efficient. An efficient solution is also a hammer.
And of course the hammer is the effective solution.
If used as a hammer it is just another hammer (and an ineffective one at that because it is going to slide off the nail and cause you injury or shatter and cause you injury).
I hope that was just to prove a point and that you were wearing goggles and gloves. If not that's borderline Darwin award territory.
You just have to repaint the house to be able to use it.
The engineer might think it solves the problem and does so in a way that is seen as cheaper, easier, and faster. But in reality it's not what was needed and the elegance of the solution will come back to bite them when the first user wants the picture a bit higher (which is normally met with "why would you want to do that?")