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Comment by h0l0cube | Hacker News Reader

> A good engineer in my opinion isn't one who can build things well, but one who is willing to say, "no I'm not building that at all" and even remove features that are being used if the cost of maintaining those feature are not worth the benefits they provide.

I'm not sure what domain you work in, but in mine, the feature set is determined by the business requirements. e.g., if you're writing an app, you can't say to the client, "Don't add this potentially revenue-generating feature because it'll introduce bugs." What the article is suggesting, is that writing the same feature set with less code is likely to lead to a more correct implementation.

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TL;DR: the key is to realise that you wouldn't be denying them a revenue stream. You would help them improve it. Look at it from a broader perspective.

If you say "You've projected so-and-so much revenue from this feature. Our projection is that it's implementation will cost this, future maintenance that, and it will introduce bugs which will lose you this much revenue and cost this much to fix. We propose you change the spec this and that way, and you will get out of most of the drawbacks while still retaining most of the benefit"

any sane business would not go "shut up and go home" but rather engage "okay, but what about sub-requirement xyz -- did you consider that in detail?" and from there on you can create something amazeballs together.

Either way you’re still fulfilling business requirements. If there’s a more efficient way to serve the same goal, you’re talking optimisation, and that absolutely aligns with a smaller code base (again the actual point of the article), but not ‘less features’

Well, sometimes it's better for the business with a feature present, sometimes with the feature absent, sometimes with the feature exchanged for another that's even better. It all depends on the feature in question and the business context.

And to my original point: that a business requirement adds more potential bugs is not sufficient to obviate implementing it. The only sufficient argument is that it doesn’t provide the product owner as much value as it costs to implement and maintain, but rarely is the developer in a position to judge that - they just provide the cost estimates and the PO can decide if they want to wear it or not.

You rarely see business requirements. You see an interpretation of them. Your job as an engineer is to understand the actual business requirements so you can question the interpretation of them and then simplify it.

With that said, many requirements are technical and then you've even bigger freedom.

> You rarely see business requirements. You see an interpretation of them.

At the end of the day, you answer to the bottom line. If you can achieve what is needed of your program (i.e., the business requirements) with less code, it seems you're less likely to have as many bugs - the point of the article. I think here, a good choice of expressive language/framework can pay dividends, moreso than trifling over the product owner over what functionality should go.

It’s the developers responsibility to question the feasibility and risk of the clients business requirements. The ones in charge are of course taking the final decision in the end anyway, but the flag should at least have been raised.

I think you misunderstand, some stuff has to go in but it is absolutely necessary as a dev to push back[1] on bad requirements, or at least that's my take.

[1] admittedly in some cases you can't for various reasons, including bosses that won't listen.

I probably could have been clearer about that.

I think as an engineer it's your job to do a bit of cost / benefit analysis on what you're being asked to build and at a minimum provide a rough estimate about the time / effort it will take to build and maintain so everyone is on the same page. And sometimes I think it is your job to argue that something shouldn't be built at all.

I guess a good example of this would be at the place I worked a few years back... When I first got there one of the complains I would hear a lot from the business was that the site was too slow and that every time they asked the dev team to improve it they only managed to make limited improvements.

So I took a look into it and realised that the main issue was that we had something like 20 marketing scripts running on the site. When I started asking why we have [x] script someone would always provide me a valid reason, "Oh, Sally and her team use that for [y] reason". Okay fine, so then I ask Sally if we can remove it, but she obviously says no because this specific tool best suites her team's needs.

You could argue no single dev was really to blame here. At each step along the way they were just adding a single script to fulfil some business requirement, and as a team the devs couldn't reduce the number of scripts to improve performance because they were all deemed essential by the business.

But I think this is exactly where a good engineer would start pushing back against the business. Given this was a large corporate I spent a few weeks escalating the issue higher up the business until I finally got authority to start removing scripts and was able to put in a process for requesting new ones to be added. Imo the main issue here wasn't even the scripts themselves but that the dev team just didn't have enough authority about what they were being asked to build so they'd knowingly build crap because was what the business was asking of them.

Me pushing to remove the majority of these scripts and give the dev team more authority pissed a lot of people off. Several teams were arguing that it was going to have an impact on their performance, and in some cases that they couldn't do their job at all. Higher up in the business people were pissed because now the dev team started saying no to them for the first time ever, but overtime the benefits of this became obvious to most people. Site performance improved dramatically, the dev team were spending way less time fixing bugs, we were able to prioritise dev tasks like upgrades, etc. And eventually a few people even thanked us lol.

I guess I'd never actually say, "no I'm not building that at all" - this is just how I feel a lot of the time. I think it's more about explaining costs and trying to get everyone onboard that something shouldn't be built when it doesn't make sense.

> if you're writing an app, you can't say to the client, "Don't add this potentially revenue-generating feature because it'll introduce bugs."

See this actually worries me - why do you feel like that? If you think what you're being asked to do could introduce bugs and you're not convinced about how much revenue it will generate then you probably should be having a conservation with the client about whether it should be built in the first place imo.

>See this actually worries me - why do you feel like that? If you think what you're being asked to do could introduce bugs and you're not convinced about how much revenue it will generate then you probably should be having a conservation with the client about whether it should be built in the first place imo.

I feel like I'm repeating myself a lot so I'll point you to another comment:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33573035

> And to my original point: that a business requirement adds more potential bugs is not sufficient to obviate implementing it. The only sufficient argument is that it doesn’t provide the product owner as much value as it costs to implement and maintain, but rarely is the developer in a position to judge that - they just provide the cost estimates and the PO can decide if they want to wear it or not.

It's more an issue of competent estimation and communication than gatekeeping. If the complexity costs have been adequately communicated by the technical staff to the product owners/managers/stakeholders/etc, and they insist on decisions that both add significant maintenance cost and, by your humble measure, aren't positioning the product better, it's time for you to move on to different company/client.

> So I took a look into it and realised that the main issue was that we had something like 20 marketing scripts running on the site. When I started asking why we have [x] script someone would always provide me a valid reason, "Oh, Sally and her team use that for [y] reason". Okay fine, so then I ask Sally if we can remove it, but she obviously says no because this specific tool best suites her team's needs.

Not sure this is in the scope of what we're talking about. Intra-organisation conflicts on the business requirements don't mean that business requirements don't have primacy here, it just means those requirements were badly specified and badly maintained. Perhaps a faster website is a greater requirement than the scripts were for the marketing department, but the business requirements for marketing haven't gone away, and really an alternative and performant system should have been made in their stead to enable marketing to do their job well again, again, if its decided that this provides values for the business. And the developer doesn't really have the authority to speak on whether it does or not.

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