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Comment by c3534l | Hacker News Reader

This... this is just my life right now. Get a contract, spend all of my time doing anything other than actually accomplish anything, and then after wasting time adhering to project requirements that don't make sense, wind up delivering something that could have been done in 10% of the time if people listened to me at the start of the project.

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>wind up delivering something that could have been done in 10% of the time if people listened to me at the start of the project.

I felt that way until I eventually got to a point where people did listen - and it turned out to be false. I underestimate the effort required on first glance and I oversimplify things in hindsight. Also I'm a developer - not a business guy - I can guess a lot of things on the requirement side but a lot of it is outside of my domain. This is something that I have to be aware of now when I'm in a position to give such estimates.

Don't get me wrong - I think there's a lot of room for improvement in almost everything I worked on before and after me - but that gut feeling of how I could have done things was never on point for me. With the article in question - too many people involved in the decision - no way to know the final result for sure until people see it have a bunch of meetings, see the iterations and decide on this - rarely do you have the person with deciding power know/understand these things clearly from the start. And you need to account for bureaucracy BS time-waste - it's just a fact of life when dealing with such clients.

Your comment was something like eye - opener for me.

Start a consultancy, name it (or if you have one, rename it to) Cassandra[0].

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cassandra "Cassandra was cursed to utter prophecies that were true but that no one believed."

And in keeping with the spirit of the article charge murderous fees to help people with their "Big Data" Cassandra installations, only to find out after weeks of wading through a management quagmire that the data in question can be stored in a few KB text file.

Incidentally, Cassandra is called like that because she kills the /Oracle/...

Selenium being the cure for Mercury poisoning, but I guess that's neither here nor there. :-)

Devious! I love it.

"Big Data" doesn't mean "makes Excel slow down" or "needs to scroll in Excel" :) If you can fit it on a thumbdrive you can buy from a Walmart, it's probably not 'big data'.

This goes for so, so many things I've seen where it's not even big data, but crap like some small part of their total dataset being a graph (unlikely to ever go beyond a thousandish nodes for any given connected set, and even that'd be unusually high, and certain to be sparsely connected to boot) so of course we have to use a hipster-ass graph db adding thousands in development costs and making the whole thing harder to work with and (demonstrably—this wasn't the first project they'd made this mistake on) less stable eyeroll.

Starting a new project? You almost certainly don't need something other than 1) files (yes, seriously), or 2) SQLite (yes, seriously), or 3) Postgresql or some other multi-paradigm, capable SQL DB. If the former two, please also consider whether you even need a f*cking server or are actually writing something that ought to be desktop/mobile software. That's another expensive, feature-delaying, and UX-harming mistake I've seen.

I started a new job where I was not officially a programmer and my machine was locked down so that I could use basically nothing except Microsoft Office, and after a couple of months, I have taught myself to do nearly any sort of data processing I previously did with Linux, Oracle, Perl, Selenium, etc. using Excel, Access, and VBA. Obviously, this doesn't involve that much data, but my previous job was really not "big data" either and they paid for all sorts of expensive licenses.

I'm enjoying myself much more than I used to, because I've escaped the red tape of development and get to solve problems that matter to nontechnical people without intermediaries predigesting the requirements.

If I was starting a business, I would definitely always try to do almost anything with Excel and Access first before deciding to invest in an industrial strength solution whether Postgres, Oracle or "big data".

This really is true, I worked on a project where we were meant to be getting hourly files into a data lake, the files so small we couldn't reach the recommended size of 256mb per file (compressed parquet in azure adls) - the files were like 1 mb each - a years worth of data was tiny and the processing overhead ridiculous

If your workflows don't bog down your servers, add big data technologies until they do!

I think if you cant fit a single data set on the biggest commonly used hard drive is another good metric.

It's pretty much what's happening on my assigned project. It's a legacy app created in the 90s... most of the time spent is just things that takes 1-3 days but due to the constant tweaks and re-tweaks it can take months. In a personal sense it doesn't affect me. I do the work they require me to do and get paid for it. Professionally and personally, I'm a huge mess because I'm frustrated on how bad is the decisionmaking. I feel I'm just wasting, and even though I'm paid for it it just doesn't feel like I'm doing anything with my career. Sigh.

> In a personal sense it doesn't affect me

> I'm a huge mess

> I feel I'm just wasting

> doesn't feel like I'm doing anything with my career

Sounds like it does affect you in every sense.

You should probably try to adjust that, before you burnout not just for that specific job but your carrer in general

I'm burnout and have been questioning myself after 2 years servicing clients in the company I'm in if I'm good enough for other roles (using as example) promoted in HackerNews, or whatever job portal.

When I spend so much time idling by and letting that frustration build up... I just start questioning if I'll be able to do other roles and not fail the team or whatever company I'll be working for because of how dormant I am.

It's not like I knew a lot. I don't consider myself to be super talented, just the average guy trying to make it out there but yea... I need to look into moving on.

My advice is to interview a couple times (with companies you don't mind missing out on), find out what you are missing and work on side projects that interest you. Then interview again about 6 months later. There is nothing like interviews to set your mind straight. Competition and hard questions seem to energize my "survival" instinct.

...doing something hard and outside of your comfort zone I guess is what I am recommending.

I was in the same situation as you at my previous job, feeling like I wasn’t learning anything because I was working on a legacy system where every design and business decision made was pure insanity

After five years at this place I finally got my shit together and applied for a job

I spent the job interview asking pointed questions about their infrastructure and how they ran their business and then I contrasted their way of doing things with my old job and explained why their way was so much better

Turns out I was learning! And learning how NOT to do things carries some value

Invest time into thinking about and listing specific things you've learned (technical, but also organizational, managerial, etc.) from maintaining this horrible legacy system.

This list will show you that it hasn't been a complete waste of your time, and it will show future employers that you're thoughtful, observant, respectful of your own time, and healthily critical.

My estimate would be that about 70% of all IT/software projects on the planet are like that.

Edit: Clearly I am in an optimistic mood this morning.

I think 70% is quite optimistic.

Sometimes the desired result is not known ahead, at project start, and twisting and turning is part of the process of (hopefully) ending up with something that people are happy with. It's just part of human nature and needs to be embraced. You just ensure you are paid for it.

This is the optimistic take. :) But there's a difference between

exploring the design space and iterating until you end up with a product that makes the customer happy

and

endlessly reworking decisions every time the next "stakeholder" in the customer's org sees a part of the bikeshed that they have an opinion on

One is a skill-engaging and -enhancing professional project. The other is the road to burnout.

Yeah, absolutely, agree on that :).

Reminds me of the Battlechess duck, point 5 here: https://blog.codinghorror.com/new-programming-jargon/

I think most of the impediments are intentionally created to hinder projects so that nothing looks to easy or successful. This may help explain why some PMs or product owners inflate the product features when internally advertising the effort, that way if other people throw up roadblocks they are less likely to impact a core feature.

I suspect something similar. I had a project which had a team of developers for six months; we didn't do anything the first four months (I spent a lot of time on HN during that time!). After those four months, we discovered that during the last month, being December, we were not supposed to release anything (as it might endanger the end-of-year runs). We did the entire thing in two weeks and then deployed it in the remaining two (deploying was a nightmare).

At some point, we discovered that the team lead wanted to be promoted to manager so he needed a reasonably-complex-but-actually-simple project as a "win".

This has been my experience and it might be sane. The 90% went on project/requirements discovery. Remember that you are doing this through several people, so it's multi-dimensional and once you leave 2/3 dimensions things start to get really complex.

The consolation prize is that you're paid by the hour.

>> if people listened to me at the start of the project.

The dream of all software developers.

That assumes that the problem is best solved by developing new software - which quite frequently isn't the case!

That assumes software developers think the problem is best solved by developing new software - which quite frequently isn't the case!

Oh how I wish we could stop reinventing this same stupid wheel badly. And change the "wants" framed as requirements into something more reasonable, so that we could get away developing less bumpy wheels, perhaps even use one off the shelf.

Well, in my experience a lot of developers do generally see the world in terms of opportunities to develop new software.

Edit: I don't think is a bad thing and I am prone to it myself !

I am very much in agreement with you.

At my previous place, after several times where the wheel was re-invented I asked one of my senior guys what did he think he got paid for.

Perhaps unsurprisingly the answer was to design features, write code, review code and advise support. Whether any of this delivered any value to the company was, seemingly neither here nor there and he'd held my position before I joined the company, so it's not like he never had to think about these things or at least he should've thought about those things but the code would testify that he hadn't.

Sadly, this is pretty common

I do think it's a bad thing. In my experience the best developers are those who view new software as a last resort (or rather a second-last resort, with manual work being the last resort).

> Oh how I wish we could stop reinventing this same stupid wheel badly. And change the "wants" framed as requirements into something more reasonable, so that we could get away developing less bumpy wheels, perhaps even use one off the shelf.

We'd be out of many jobs if this happened.

We'd be out of many jobs if people started breaking windows.

Or maybe that time & money could be spent on something else, it's not like we're running out of things to do.

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