Hacker News Reader

Comment by nocturnial | Hacker News Reader

You wanted something done, you explained why it should be done, they agreed and will implement it.

I would quit that job immediately! I'm not even being sarcastic. If it bothers you that much that people like to plan things and that takes too much time according to you then yes, just quit. I've been on the other end of things where someone said: "Oh, I can implement this in 5 minutes". The first few persons I would happily explain why this isn't the case, but after that.. thank you managers for isolating me from this crap.

View on HN

My response to "Oh, I can implement this in 5 minutes" is always "but will you support it?"

I think this is the hardest thing about moving from a startup to a more mature company (either through growth and age or acquisition); you have to move your mindset from building to supporting. Building is fun and creative, supporting can be tedious and soul sucking (but needed!). It's a huge, and legitimate, reason why large companies slow down (either to support, or to consider support in the build process).

And it's not just large companies that slow down, either. I work for a very small organization (three developers) that's been around for 10 years. We'd love to spend more time building new stuff, but we've got 10 years' worth of old code to support. We don't have bureaucracy getting in the way, but we still can't move as fast as new startups.

I've only ever worked at small companies, but have a few friends that work at larger ones.

And I always bust up laughing reading their stories about trying to avoid adding even more code under their support umbrella. One person wrote a useful tool for fun, it got passed around and all of a sudden an unrelated team from halfway around the world started asking him for features.

It's definitely a mindset I'm not used to.

> "Oh, I can implement this in 5 minutes"

Close to a decade ago I got into a heated debate with my then boss over a project which was delayed and got served this(just with three months instead of five minutes).

I was fired and sure enough, few months went by and I get a call from the client asking if I could testify against my former boss.

That crazy sonofabitch actually tried to pull this off, but grossly underestimated the project's complexity, to predictable results.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com