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Comment by add-sub-mul-div | Hacker News Reader

I'll stare at a blank editor for an hour with three different solutions in my head that I could implement, and type nothing until a good enough one comes to mind that will save/avoid time and trouble down the road. That last solution is not best for any simple reason like algorithmic complexity or anything that can be scraped from web sites.

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No shade on your skills, but for most problems, this is already false; the solutions have already been scraped.

All OSS has been ingested, and all the discussion in forum like this about it, and the personal blog posts and newsletters about it; and the bug tracking; and theh pull requests, and...

and training etc. is only going to get better and filtering out what is "best."

A vast majority of the problems I’m asked to solve at work do not have open-source code I can simply copy or discussion forums that already decided the best answer. Enterprise customers rarely put that stuff out there. Even if they did, it doesn’t account for the environment the solution sit in, possible future integrations, off-the-wall requests from the boss, or knowing that internal customer X is going to want some other wacky thing, so we need to make life easy on our future selves.

At best, what I find online are basic day 1 tutorials and proof on concept stuff. None of it could be used in production where we actually need to handle errors and possible failure situations.

Obviously novel problems require novel solutions, but the vast majority of software solutions are remixes of existing methods. I don’t know your work so I may be wrong in this specific case, but there are a vanishingly small number of people pushing forward the envelope of human knowledge on a day-to-day basis.

My company (and others in the same sector) depends on certain proprietary enterprise software that has literally no publicly available API documentation online, anywhere.

There is barely anything that qualifies as documentation that they are willing to provide under NDA for lock-in reasons/laziness (ERPish sort of thing narrowly designed for the specific sector, and more or less in a duopoly).

The difficulty in developing solutions is 95% understanding business processes/requirements. I suspect this kind of thing becomes more common the further you get from a "software company” into specific industry niches.

The point is that the best solution is based on specific context of my situation and the right judgment couldn't be known by anyone outside of my team/org.

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