Nope. He and I both knew that the ugly 20% that I would exclude is actually indispensable from the customers’ perspective. We were talking about our ongoing efforts to modernize the product, and I brought it up to illustrate the same point that this blogger does.
The point about the “happy path” not actually being the bulk of the work is something that even seasoned devs forget about. I’m working on a stand along CLI app for work and our team had a basic prototype of the core algorithm working pretty quickly. But none of the “grunt” work was done: error reporting, internal error handling for easier bug reports, command line options, wrappers for better API integration with 3rd party code, and proper communication with other tools. Don’t forget actually integrating these things with existing infrastructure, build systems, and all the tests.
I’ve said “I could do that in a lot less time” about what seems to be a trivial app before. But that was when I was younger and dumber.
I find it interesting that he starts with Google as an example.
If I had to name a company which has a product that is relatively simple in technical terms a search engine would certainly not be on top of my list. It seems relatively obvious to me that creating a good search engine is a tough achievement. Sure, creating some kind of search engine is probably easy - but then you end up with another Bing, not another Google.
I’m sure Bing has well over a thousand people working on it too. I think it’s a respectable effort – it must be the second best search engine AFAICT.
FWIW I joined Google when it had around 3,000 employees, in early 2005. So this was 6 months after GMail came out, but before Google Maps came out, so Google was still a search engine.
I remember my former coworkers asking why the company was so damn big. They thought it should be like 50 engineers and 50 non-technical people. It was just a website with a box, so how hard can it be?
I don’t think their reaction was stupid, as I think pretty much everybody thought that at the time. Certainly it was a shock to see how much technology there was behind the scenes.
Bing is actually quite good; it’s probably only about 3-4 years behind Google & you’ll recall that Google was still pretty damn good 4 years ago. DDG may be a better example of an 80% search engine ;-p
Well, Internet comments aren’t known for their nuance, unfortunately. The fact he dignified these comments with a whole blog post feels over the top to me, but, it was interesting reading!
I recently told my boss I could rewrite 80% of our project from scratch in a few months, with two caveats.
Is that really helpful at all?
Nope. He and I both knew that the ugly 20% that I would exclude is actually indispensable from the customers’ perspective. We were talking about our ongoing efforts to modernize the product, and I brought it up to illustrate the same point that this blogger does.
The point about the “happy path” not actually being the bulk of the work is something that even seasoned devs forget about. I’m working on a stand along CLI app for work and our team had a basic prototype of the core algorithm working pretty quickly. But none of the “grunt” work was done: error reporting, internal error handling for easier bug reports, command line options, wrappers for better API integration with 3rd party code, and proper communication with other tools. Don’t forget actually integrating these things with existing infrastructure, build systems, and all the tests.
I’ve said “I could do that in a lot less time” about what seems to be a trivial app before. But that was when I was younger and dumber.
I find it interesting that he starts with Google as an example.
If I had to name a company which has a product that is relatively simple in technical terms a search engine would certainly not be on top of my list. It seems relatively obvious to me that creating a good search engine is a tough achievement. Sure, creating some kind of search engine is probably easy - but then you end up with another Bing, not another Google.
I’m sure Bing has well over a thousand people working on it too. I think it’s a respectable effort – it must be the second best search engine AFAICT.
FWIW I joined Google when it had around 3,000 employees, in early 2005. So this was 6 months after GMail came out, but before Google Maps came out, so Google was still a search engine.
I remember my former coworkers asking why the company was so damn big. They thought it should be like 50 engineers and 50 non-technical people. It was just a website with a box, so how hard can it be?
I don’t think their reaction was stupid, as I think pretty much everybody thought that at the time. Certainly it was a shock to see how much technology there was behind the scenes.
Bing is actually quite good; it’s probably only about 3-4 years behind Google & you’ll recall that Google was still pretty damn good 4 years ago. DDG may be a better example of an 80% search engine ;-p
Well, Internet comments aren’t known for their nuance, unfortunately. The fact he dignified these comments with a whole blog post feels over the top to me, but, it was interesting reading!