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Comment by Ace17 | Hacker News Reader

Ever had this discussion with a coworker?

Coworker: "I hadn't enough time to do it right"

You: "Given enough time, how would you do it differently?"

Coworker: "............" (crickets)

IMHO it's not related to deadlines only ; the "not enough time" argument is often a comfortable fallacy, keeping us from facing the limits of our current skills.

I found it to be especially true with testing. I've lost the count of how many times I heard "we didn't had time to write (more) tests". But testing is hard. And when given enough time, these developers don't magically start doing it "right" overnight.

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Knowing when something isn't right is easier to knowing how to do it right. So I would be wary as to saying it is a lack of skill by your co-workers.

e.g.

I had to write a bespoke popup window launcher for a large gambling company in the UK. The games were mainly the awful slots games that you see in motorway service stations. These are basically one arm bandits on steroids.

There is a lot of logic that was in JavaScript that should have been in C# and I had to design it correctly to work with a third party Proprietary CMS system and I had to manage session tokens on 3 to 4 third party systems. Not easy.

It took me about 2 weeks of just reading the code and absorbing it, drawing lots of diagrams of how data flowed through the system and then porting that logic over to C# in a way that would work with the CMS system in a logical and OOP fashion and handling auth tokens effectively.

>I found it to be especially true with testing. I've lost the count of how many times I heard "we didn't had time to write (more) tests". But testing is hard. And when given enough time, these developers don't magically start doing it "right" overnight.

Bingo. It's not necessarily only skills though. It can be myriad reasons and "no time" is just the easiest excuse they can think of. In big companies I've often seen the company process prescribing such bad tools that a good TDD testing strategy is impossible to do with those tools, but they won't move away from them, because somebody in purchasing already bought 10,000 licenses for this bad tool (which is often just a bad GUI, which doesn't really help, except for selling the thing).

The worst tool was a bad GUI where you couldn't even define functions you want to use, that had slow (>1h), non-deterministic, test execution, for a unit test.

To even write unit tests effectively you need to write your code in a certain differently.

In C# this normally means using IOC + DI.

Also almost nobody I know does proper TDD. I know it is very convincing when one of the TDD evangelists shows you how to write something like a method to work out the nth number in a fibonacci sequence using nothing but just writing tests.

In reality most 95% of developers that even write tests write the logic and write the test afterwards to check the logic does what it should.

and let’s not forget the ever popular “bug-driven testing”.

>To even write unit tests effectively you need to write your code in a certain differently.

>In C# this normally means using IOC + DI.

I've become quite partial to functional programming in the last few years. Side effect free functions with functions as interfaces for DI lend themselves perfectly to TDD and data parallel async without worrying too much.

C# is now slowly taking over most of the good features from F#, but I think the culture won't transform so easily.

I've quickly realized that there is never enough time.

If anyone feels that there is enough time then (depending on the position dev/manager/client/etc) he starts slacking, moving focus, moving deadlines, moving staff, demanding more features/support/documentation or new requirements analysis, start being pissed more about smaller bugs.

Unlike your coworker, I _always_ have a plan. Often a dozen of them. With various pros and cons for each.

But also unlike your coworker, I probably _figured out how to do it right_ in the time given. It's pretty rare that I don't have time to do it right; it does happen (especially with extreme instances of scope creep and requirements drift), but it's rare.

Which I guess is your point? The time excuse is just an excuse, and a good developer writes good code.

The one that gets me is when you've designed something as simple as possible and then to make it "simpler" people insist on making it less general and paradoxically more complex in a small way.

Related to that is the "obvious performance fix" that doesn't perform faster that keeps burning up time for years long after it was proven to not be faster because freshers never found out about it and the oldsters forgot.

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