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Comment by mattjaynes | Hacker News Reader

Novelty Driven Development (NDD)

Chris points out a great example of NDD here with Hadoop.

I do a lot of client work and I see this mistake CONSTANTLY. So often in fact, that I recently wrote up a story to illustrate the problem. Rather than use a tech example, I use a restaurant and plumbing to drive the point home. When the same scenario is put into the context of something more concrete like physical plumbing, it shows how ridiculous NDD really is.

http://devopsu.com/blog/boring-systems-build-badass-business...

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That blog's background is 2.6 MB, perhaps you should compress it a bit.

Also, I think it's a bit disingenuous to compare a complex system built to various specific needs versus a simpler one that doesn't address those needs at all and just say "their only difference is that one worked and the other didn't".

Obviously, if the only criterion was that it should just work, everyone would go with the simpler system. The more complex system probably had some things going for it, too, otherwise nobody would choose it.

"Obviously, if the only criterion was that it should just work, everyone would go with the simpler system."

It's obvious to you and me, but to many people it's not obvious at all. You only have to look at the very large deadpool of companies that made these mistakes and died because of it.

People optimize prematurely, scale prematurely, make ego based decisions, care more about interesting tech than making the business grow, etc etc. That's really the whole point of the parent article - people make bad decisions because of the allure of some "cool" but complex and unnecessary tool.

Also, thanks for the note on the background - I'll fix that :)

I get your point of course, but indoor plumbing is orders of magnitude more complicated than a well and outhouses. Replacing wells with fountains and eliminating outhouses are driven by population density and public health concerns -- but once available they are preferable to the alternative, despite their complexity.

actually in the developing world people prefer cellphones to indoor plumbing. i expect this to continue to be the case.

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