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Comment by fareesh | Hacker News Reader

I remember reading a blog post some months ago here from a former AirBnb employee where they talked about how some senior manager in the company wrote an incredibly detailed spec for a CRUD feature which required them to invent a datatype because they insisted on using no more than N bytes to store some inconsequential field. There was also a description of how the author had to crawl through a parking garage to escape a meeting wherein he insisted that nobody was allowed to leave.

I feel like there is no accountability for these clowns. They'll inevitably switch jobs and ruin the work lives of so many developers with their stupidity. There is a culture of not wanting to name your abuser for some reason. It's weird.

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I believe this was at Snap Inc. I’ll try to find the link later.

This is it: My Time at Snap https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21122123

My bad!!

I feel like the technology industry as it stands promotes over-engineering and encourages it. There are a lot of developers out there that built their entire careers working on (or designing) over-engineered balls of mud and thus will bring that way of thinking into any new role they join, thus spreading the problem to their next company (if they don't have this problem already). There can't be "accountability" when nobody considers this behaviour a problem to begin with and actually hires based on how many over-engineered things you delivered in the past.

At a previous employer I remember they had someone build a React front-end which talks to a GraphQL proxy which itself talks to a REST-based API and seemed proud of his creation. There was absolutely no reason why the front-end couldn't talk to the REST-based API directly (it was on the same domain, and the front-end already had a valid auth token), but now there's one extra moving part in the system that can (and did) fail.

At another place they for some reason decided that they needed React despite only a single page of the application actually needed to be "real time". 9 months later they still didn't even have a functional registration form and then it took them over a day for the basic feature of displaying the QR code for two-factor auth enrolment. The same signup form would take me less than a day to do in its entirety using "boring" HTML pages and forms (which our framework already had lots of helpers for, so the backend code for it would've been around 100 lines).

Surgeons usually recommend more surgery and pharmacists more pills. It may not be conscious bias, but human nature tilts each to favor solutions toward their own skill sets.

My manager want's "pretty URL's" even though it's not a good idea to bookmark CRUD detail pages. It creates internal code messes to keep them pretty. It's yet another me-too feature that bloats the stack. I proposed a compromise, but he really wants them pretty.

There are too few K.I.S.S Cops in IT; the Bloat Mafia reigns. Warren Buffett says part of the secret to getting rich is confidence and conviction to say "no" when the logic and numbers don't support an idea but peer pressure says "yes". https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22795294

> There is a culture of not wanting to name your abuser for some reason.

No one wants to burn bridges. The world gets really small at the most inconvenient times.

Like with any cult, the victim get double abused, evicted and the people remaining justify why it had to be so. This is the normal behaviour.

You really have to work within the system, and in the end, become the same system.

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