Hacker News Reader

Comment by emsy | Hacker News Reader

The author describes a YAGNI approach. The interviewer and you seem to want a solution that's already generalized and future proof. YAGNI is always the right approach to take at the beginning of a problem. But that's one of the insights that often come with programming experience and reflection. Unfortunately, seniority is an unreliable indicator for either attribute.

View on HN

Perhaps one should ask the interviewer whether they want a YAGNI-style solution or a more general/abstract solution. If you can give both, you may really impress the interviewer.

Asking first to understand the needs and intention of the application should be a first step anyhow. Diving into the deep-end face first and coding is rarely the correct approach (except maybe a startup racing for market-share).

> generalized and future proof

Reminds me of a blog post I read,

https://www.sebastiansylvan.com/post/the-perils-of-future-co...

At what point does it become over-engineering?

You often can't tell up-front. If you never get back more than what you put into an abstraction, it was probably over-engineered.

I think the article captures the problem even better than a similar one that was recently on the frontpage of HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17850836

I can't remember a situation where undergeneralized code came back to bite me. I have however seen (and admittedly written some) prematurely generalized code that became messy legacy code.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com