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Comment by weego | Hacker News Reader

I'm going to be the token buzz-kill senior dev:

If you run into problems none of the senior devs have experience in and have no answers for, my first concern is that you're massively over complicating something we've solved in a simpler and less risk-exposed way. My second concern is that you're intentionally reinventing the wheel in a way that is massively over complicating something we've solved in a simpler and less risk-exposed way just for your own interest.

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Unless your question is: "How does this legacy system work? Why can't we make it do what we want to make it do?" I built my career on this :-) Give me your worst code! The best thing about this is that nobody gives a crap what you do with that stuff as long as you don't break it. Say goodbye to the endless conversations of how to indent your code.

OP is proposing you solve the problem if no one else has a solution. You are proposing to solve the problem by simplifying. I don't think these need to be mutually exclusive pieces of advice.

I think what he's trying to say is that if you find yourself with problems that none of the senior people have had to solve before, it's very likely that you are modeling the target system as the wrong problem. As a strawman example, "how can i make a new class inherit from multiple classes" is attacking the wrong problem (multiple inheritance), but a junior person might not be aware that it's the wrong problem.

Or the question is "can we solve this better with the actor model", which is what I asked my team last week.

None of us has any experience with the actor model, but rather than dismissing the question, we're investigating.

If the senior people have never had to solve the problem before, how can they know if it's a valid problem?

Part of being a senior dev is realizing that novel problems are extremely rare, and when confronted with one first investigating what's actually needing to be solved before diving into designing a novel (and possibly complex) solution.

This is how dinosaurs are born.

"No experience in and no answers for" implies a gap in your knowledge, not a bad question.

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