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Comment by bartread | Hacker News Reader

At some level this is one of the most "no shit, Sherlock" pieces I've ever read. On the other hand you see it happening absolutely everywhere so it very much needed to be said.

I don't know why it is but people seem much more interested in the tech than in the value they can create. Which is odd. Why? Because it's the second part where you get to exercise the most creativity and do the most interesting work. How do you think LinkedIn arrived at Kafka, for example?

What'a possibly more baffling is it's not just the devs who buy into the technology hype: often it's the so-called business types, and those in management and leadership positions, advocating and egging them on.

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> How do you think LinkedIn arrived at Kafka, for example?

Well, Franz Kafka wrote about incomprehensible, oppressive bureaucracy as a way of life, and LinkedIn did a decent job of porting that to Web 2.0.

>I don't know why it is but people seem much more interested in the tech than in the value they can create.

Well, for some engineers who don't have much say in product development, the amount of value they can create is bounded by the business specification/deliverables they have to produce (and maybe equity or lack thereof plays a role here). However, if the architecture is considered their responsibility, then there's a lot of fun in using _shiny new toys_ even if it's overkill and will incur unnecessary technical debt. It's fun to overengineer things.

Not saying it's a good thing or even professional behaviour, but I understand it.

I want a word for things that are simultaneously "no shit, Sherlock" and yet also profound things that we forget very easily. There's a lot of them. For engineering, I think "always consider costs/benefits" is probably #1. It sounds so stupid simple, and yet I feel like it's the exception when it gets deployed successfully.

"common sense"

"Whoa!!!!!!"

That seems to tilt a bit towards the profound.

If everyone just focused on business value and ignored the technology aspects then nothing would've been invented.

There would be no Internet, Web, VR, ML, AI etc and we would all be writing assembler or using punch cards.

> If everyone just focused on business value and ignored the technology aspects then nothing would've been invented. > There would be no Internet, Web, VR, ML, AI etc and we would all be writing assembler or using punch cards.

The Internet, Web, ML, and AI at least were all originally invented using research funding, not business funding. The Internet (specifically the TCP/IP suite) was funded by DARPA, the research arm of the US Department of Defense. So you're right that some people need to focus on something other than business value, but usually that is someone paid to do research, not paid to implement a specific solution that needs to be widely deployed within 1-3 years.

But if you're picking a product to use for a particular task, you aren't doing that kind of research. You are instead doing engineering. That is, you are determining how to solve a particular problem using the knowledge and resources (including reusable code) at hand. So you need to think to determine what collection of resources will actually do the job well, at reasonable cost and time, etc. Different problem.

All of those I listed are completely different now to when they were first invented. To the point of being unrecognisable. And all of that is because of real world innovation from real world engineers solving real world problems.

This anti-innovation mindset is just as damaging overall as everyone using the latest tools and ignoring the more proven ones.

How is this article anti-innovation? It's saying, "Don't adopt a solution that doesn't actually fit your needs." It's not innovative to use MapReduce to do payroll reports at the end of a quarter, when a simple SQL query can produce the exact same thing. It's just silly. It's not innovative to select something that overfits your needs unless it actually prepares you for your (ideally known, but at least high confidence expectation) needs.

I shouldn't drop a bunch of money on an underutilized system unless it offers enough benefit.

> How is this article anti-innovation?

Quite. And, as you've said, combining a bunch of tech you don't need into a poorly fitting solution isn't particularly innovative. The innovation tends to come from using the right tools for the job and creating a great solution using them.

> It's not innovative to use MapReduce to do payroll reports at the end of a quarter, when a simple SQL query can produce the exact same thing.

I really, really hope this is just a random illustrative example.

Yes. That’s not a thing I’ve seen in my office or any office I’ve been in. It was just an example.

There is absolutely nothing "anti-innovation" about saying don't use technology designed for problems you don't have, for reasons you can't articulate.

Innovation is driven by addressing problems people actually have with new ideas. Chasing taillights is a very poor driver for it.

Did you actually read my comment? Right in the middle of it I made the following remark: "How do you think LinkedIn arrived at Kafka, for example?" That's just one example cited in TFA of something invented as a result of focussing on value.

Last time I checked, necessity was the mother of invention and not the other way around.

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