Ask HN: How do you stop bad design decisions?

1 points by ameasure 4 years ago | 3 comments

I sometimes spot colleagues making design decisions that seem really bad to me. A common pattern is building something that already exists in much better form as open source software. I usually try to get them to realize the error themselves by asking questions like "how does this compare to open source library X" but it doesn't always work. How do you deal with things like this, keeping in mind that I'm not all knowing and could be wrong but also feel a responsibility to protect the larger organization from bad tech.

aviCC 4 years ago |

I had this problem too as a team leader. Most of the time employees are aware of this bad decision but still want to make their own engine/library because it's more fun and they think they can get more credit by building their own library.

Instead of telling them what to do (nobody like it) try to give them a clear deadline for the whole project.

miPushkaraj 4 years ago |

Why do you think using opensource is better than building it by yourself without boilerplate or unnecessary code

ameasure 4 years ago | |

I don't think it's always true, but in my case because the open source versions have more and better functionality, more flexible design, better documentation, are already known and used by thousands of people (easier on boarding), and maintained by a large community. It's true it has some functionality we don't need, but a couple megabytes of memory is pretty cheap relative to all the other things.