Hacker News Reader

Comment by jesterson | Hacker News Reader

> Sometimes the new guy can make a better version themselves over the weekend, not because they’re a supergenius, but because they’re not hampered by 47 teams all trying to get their stamp on the project.

In 99.9% of cases what seems to be "the better" version is better only for the "new guy" or rather his ego.

Those 47 teams hampering doesn't necessarily mean a bad thing, and more often than not actually well justified "stamps".

You only understand those things when you turn from the "supergenius" into an owner who have to take care not only of numbers on screen, but also security, interfacing, management and so on.

Or you don't turn into.

View on HN

That is often the case, but far from all the time. Other times something is made so needlessly complicated by office politics that it may never get shipped.

Not saying it never happened in history, but most of those "complications" are justified. Being narrowsighted and overfocused does not help to assess it.

Conversely, sometimes when you have 23 people designing something, they can lose track of what they’re trying to accomplish and focus on how they’re trying to accomplish it. It can be an XY problem sort of thing. “How can we get the Redis queue to do an exactly-once insertion into Kafka, if we can’t guarantee exact ordering from the Paxos framework?” “Uh, guys, aren’t we trying to send out the weekly email newsletter to our estimated 500 subscribers?” “Oh, well, I guess we could just use Mailchimp…”

Like I said earlier, it’s ok not to believe me. I don’t particularly mind. But just between us, my solution met every one of the project requirements using COTS parts because they’d made it waaayyyy harder than it needed to me.

Nothing personal, but our conversation reminds me many similar convos I had with developers who thought their product was superiour - but they could see it only from their angle. And it was superiour - but again, only under narrow view.

Good chat. Have a nice day!

Not saying you're wrong in all cases, but there are enough examples of hugely expensive megaprojects which totslly tanked, which would have definitely been much more successful with OPs approach if executed correctly. Not saying they would be done and done within a weekend, that's silly. But the alternative, poorly defined integration interfaces, multiple contractors, multiple stakeholders with conflicting requirements and zero (real) regard for the user is unfortunately fairly common, both in public (city/regional/government) and private bureaucracies.

The examples are legion, and they always seem to have NIH and baroque requirements, and be rather over- than underspecified. I would go so far as to say that these projects are almost never successful (and definitely never on time and budget).

Reply on news.ycombinator.com