Comment by bob1029 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by bob1029 | Hacker News Reader

> In my view, your engineering taste is composed of the set of engineering values you find most important. For instance:

Strange how absent the customer or underlying business always is in this discussion.

I've seen a LOT of software that could have literally just been a spreadsheet on a file share or a simple SQL ETL job. When reviewing the actual business requirements, we will often find that we don't even need a goddamn web interface. It's just assumed we're gonna build some full stack slop so we never bother to stop and ask why.

I'm watching a client (despite my advice) self destruct on yet another rewrite of a piece of software that doesn't need to exist in the first place. Looking forward to having this exact same conversation IRL in a few months.

I think the heart of bad taste comes from obsessing over tools and techniques and not ever getting meaningful things built and shipped to real customers. Being exposed to unfiltered criticism of the people who actually use your software is the fastest way to drive the noob behavior out of a developer. It's amazing how quickly you drop weird principled takes when your monkey brain senses it is disappointing others.

Can you provide examples of software that should have literally been a spreadsheet or an ETL? Not to call you out specifically but this feels like "I could have written that in a weekend". Personally whenever I have felt that way about a project it turned out I was just missing 95% of the business context/domain knowledge (part of the reason I think rewrites are a bad idea - chesterton's fence).

I can give you one - a billing system with reporting features that suck dreadfully compared to what can be done with a spreadsheet. Why not "just" let the user download a CSV and then do whatever they want with it?

I was working on this project and I kept suggesting it. It was seen as inferior and yet the system we were going to produce was far inferior in every way.

I agree that the customer / business focus is often very lacking. Sometimes because engineering is put too much into focus, but very often because of politics. At the same time it's not an easy thing to do. The "business" is usually quite bad at verbalizing their needs and requirements, especially at the level of detail that engineering requires.

Having done at least one migration from "could have literally just been a spreadsheet" applications into proper applications, I'm very careful with recommending spreadsheets. It's great how flexible they are, but that's also their major down side. If you want to enforce anything within a spreadsheet, you have few options and it's very easy for something to break. For example someone deleting a formula, a formula not including the full range, or copy & pasting breaking the references. Not to mention the performance issues you'll run into once you've collected a few rows.

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