Comment by kartan | Hacker News Reader

Comment by kartan | Hacker News Reader

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> a) Arguments don’t work because team doesn’t listen and/or doesn’t want to change because they wish to stay in their comfort zone.

It is a problem if there is no communication. To bypass all formality only hides the real problem is not solving it. It is not easy to know who is right. That is part of my job when one person is in a fight with the rest of the team my job is to listen to everybody and help to get a decision thru. I have seen all combinations, the team is right the lone ranger wrong, the lone ranger is right and the team is wrong, all are right and one path needs to be decided, all are wrong and I help them to find a different solution.

> c) Those who see a bigger picture do not care to or cannot explain it and/or keep it a secret.

Again this happens and it is a big problem that needs to be addressed. To hide it doing things rogue stile only perpetuates the problem. Sometimes is better to get everything to a halt until information is shared than to tag along for years of painful fights.

> e) Software architects

Yes. I am one. And my main problem is the arrogance of other architects, not the managers, product owners or developers in the teams. :P

You're right that the root cause needs to be fixed. My points are within an assumed context of a dysfunctional environment where the status quo is either actively maintained or simply neglected, and the person bypassing formality is only doing so because there are no other options available.

As greedo mentions in another reply to my points, you really can't have "lone rangers" on a team who do this without a valid excuse.

The point about architects was somewhat joking; of course there are good ones (such as yourself judging from your comments), but in my experience most of them are at best a useless burden and at worst an utterly destructive influence on teams.

I can tell that you are an architect from they way that you like to use the terms "right" and "wrong".

There is no right and wrong. There are only opinions and stylistic preference. There are solutions that are better and there are ones that are worse. But when you black box it and look at it from the outside, it either works or it doesn't.

This is patently not true. :)

Everything is a spectrum, but there are also clear parts of the spectrum that contains death, and clear parts of the spectrum that are better than the others.

Works is not an acceptable standard. Imagine if we built bridges with the criteria that “well I crossed the river on it, so it works”. What tonnage can it support, how many years can it stay viable, does it fail gracefully if we drive something heavier than intended over it, what amount of wind can it take... none of those things are captured by “it works”.

Similarly for code. If your answer is “well something changed, so we need to refactor” or “well that wasn’t in the requirements so we can’t do that” then your solution didn’t work in the first place, because works implies scalability, extensibility, reliability etc.

Those are not style or opinion. Making anything “work” in the now is trivial. Building things that are not fragile to change and time is engineering.

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