Hacker News Reader

Comment by 300bps | Hacker News Reader

I coach a FIRST Robotics team and I love to tell the kids stories like this so they can get a feel for what engineering is like in the real world.

Sometimes you just need to throw some duct tape on it.

View on HN

I've been a software engineer for 25 years and I think people overly romanticize this attitude and we should properly fix things more.

That’s funny. I’ve been in it for 20 years and I feel like we should be okay with hacks like this more. Isolated fixes like this usually don’t cause any knock-on effects, get the job done, and usually don’t change much. Of course, hacks in code that needs to be touched frequently or affects lots of other code is a different story.

This is a situation where it was not possible to properly fix the problem due to constraints beyond the designer's control. Coming up with the best solution given a set of requirements and constraints is the definition of design, and is where design overlaps with engineering. Fixing the workflow problem that resulted in a potentially embarrassing mistake to go unspotted until 3 days before shipping would be an example of good management...

Fixing things is always a question of improvement vs cost. If the graphics rom is already manufactured, there's a lot of cost to make new ones. Better to make changes to the program rom which hasn't been sent out yet and may likely be smaller and less expensive than the graphics rom anyway. Typically arcade machines may get one or two program updates but usually no graphics or audio updates.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com