Defender @DefenderOfBasic 2024-09-26

this is why I encourage marketing people & the average layperson to learn to code

the people who know how to code aren’t smart. They’re hiding behind a veneer of complexity so that you don’t question their work

2024-09-26

THANK YOU PEOPLE IN DMS TELLING ME TO SPLIT THE DATA INTO CHUNKS. GEE I NEITHER THOUGHT OF THAT NOR CLEARLY EXPLAINED THAT I DID IT ALREADY IN MY LONG THREAD

idk this phenomenon of ppl in technical fields being wildly dumb sometimes?


Defender @DefenderOfBasic 2024-09-26

they’ll say it’s impossible to do this product feature the artist wanted, they’ll say big words like the DB cache and the AWS cost and I’ll walk in the room and say “wtd, it’s totally possible. just put it in a spreadsheet & do it all client side” and we’ll just do it


Defender @DefenderOfBasic 2024-09-26

I’ve literally been in big tech when I’ve said “why are we doing it this way? We can do it in 2 days instead of 1 month” and the lead says “no it’s complicated”. I ask 14 other people, including other team leads, and no one understands why we need to do it that way


Defender @DefenderOfBasic 2024-09-26

Literally one fucking guy, can you believe it? Going around saying “trust me it’s complicated” and zero people agree, but are afraid for speaking up. I made a fucking secret slack channel where we gathered to talk about this. Insane stuff man


Defender @DefenderOfBasic 2024-09-26

So anyway, the lesson is, don’t let experts bully you. Test things & ask questions. The good experts will have explanations that make sense and won’t say “it’s complicated”


Defender @DefenderOfBasic 2024-09-26

Actually, that’s what I started doing. I started writing internal blog posts to explain things to people. So when he said “it’s complicated” junior engineers would say “but why can’t we do X, it solves problems ABC” and he couldn’t respond to that. The veneer was cracking


Defender @DefenderOfBasic 2024-09-26

I saved this reply by @lizhagearty because I wanted to write an article about it, about this pattern:

- “nice SIMPLE solution, but you should do this COMPLEX thing instead”

- “actually, no the simple thing works perfectly fine, thanks” (⇐- rarely do I see this pushback)

Image


Defender @DefenderOfBasic 2024-09-26

these Smart Software Engineers are so allergic to copying code that they’ll spend weeks/months on complicated solutions that are impossible to maintain because they didn’t want to do something simple/dumb. Something a “non technical” person can do


Defender @DefenderOfBasic 2024-09-26

in my field it feels less like 80% were clueless, more like 80% of peoples work could be done with a spreadsheet and high-school math proficiency. so they trick the client and then themselves into thinking they *need* many layers of complexity to compensate

2024-09-26

in my field it feels less like 80% were clueless, more like 80% of peoples work could be done with a spreadsheet and high-school math proficiency. so they trick the client and then themselves into thinking they *need* many layers of complexity to compensate


Defender @DefenderOfBasic 2024-09-26

ugh this makes me want to setup a consulting service where all I do is come in and tell you whether your engineers are BS-ing you

this isn’t even malicious. It’s a miscommunication. Engineers LOVE building things, they don’t understand why you don’t want to BUILD COOL THINGS


Defender @DefenderOfBasic 2024-09-26

in my consulting service, you do NOT take my word as “expert advice”. You take my recommendations for questions/things to test, you bring it back to YOUR engineers, and you decide whether I’m right or not based on what happens next


Defender @DefenderOfBasic 2024-09-26

the type of advice I would give you is “ask them this. ask them why. ask your junior engineer to prototype it.” you don’t need to understand the code, you can see for yourself what they’re capable of shipping and what they’re not


Defender @DefenderOfBasic 2024-09-26

This is the architect ←> civil engineer relation. “Impossible to make this structure!” and then you don’t know if they’re telling straight facts or not, because you don’t know enough!

Architect Santiago Calatrava was SO real for being “FINE I’ll be the engineer too then!” x.com/DefenderOfBasi


2024-09-26

This is the architect ←> civil engineer relation. “Impossible to make this structure!” and then you don’t know if they’re telling straight facts or not, because you don’t know enough!

Architect Santiago Calatrava was SO real for being “FINE I’ll be the engineer too then!” x.com/DefenderOfBasi



Chip @theMacroChip 2024-09-26

This company sounds dysfunctional and making a secret slack channel isn’t helping