Wasteful by Design

18 points by pierrebarre 4 years ago | 7 comments

I pondered for a while that FOMO and imposter syndrome are rampant among junior software engineers as a cause of over-engineering. But my few experiences as an SE manager tells a different story, anecdotally at least; left to their own devices with time and space, the kids will come up with astonishingly optimal, even elegant solutions.

Good, confident managers can also achieve the same outcome by being very directive.

The sweetspot for catastrophe occurs when insecure developers led by insecure SEMs get into a jazzhanded squee of trendy solutionism. You get a conspiracy of avoidant mutual stroking, each trying not to expose the other's incompetence.

redhale 4 years ago | |

> "a jazzhanded squee of trendy solutionism"

Thank you for this phrase, I love it.

ketanmaheshwari 4 years ago |

Tangent: Is this really a 3 minute read for others? I could no way read this in 3 minutes and grasp it all. I would need at least 6-8 minutes. Am I doing something wrong?

eyelidlessness 4 years ago | |

I read it in about 1 minute. But that doesn’t mean you’re doing anything wrong necessarily! I have ADHD—which for me has a weird side benefit of recognizing information patterns I won’t find helpful and treating them as fields of grass rather than blades—and my brain filtered a lot of it out as “reductionist bullshit I hear incessantly”, so I mostly skimmed after I got the bent of the article.

rubbsdecvik 4 years ago | | |

This is not a judgment on you, or what you did, but I don't know if I'd define that as "reading." I did essentially the same thing you did, but I have always called it "skimming." With articles like this, I tend to skim first, to see if it's worth a deeper reading. to answer your parent comment, I could not have deeply read this post in only 3 mins. It likely would have taken 5 or more.

windows2020 4 years ago |

For those that are dealing with this: there are companies with lean stacks and talent that don't behave like this.