Hacker News new | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit login

Where are there company executives that actually know and care about these kinds of things?

Some of what you're talking about can be overdone by engineers (i.e. 100% line coverage), but a lot of what you're talking about are tools engineers have developed to make their lives easier and to improve their code quality. A linter checks for common mistakes, clarity problems, and can help ensure code is written in a consistent style which improves readability. Functional programming is a coding style that doesn't always mesh well with the languages it's tried out in, but when it does it can provide enormous benefits in local reasoning about code and I think a large part of why it's seeing a resurgence is the experience of engineers having to build large, complex systems that become baroque and difficult to reason about in OO/procedural style.

This idea that good engineers have perfect competency and write code that immune from the problems these tools help solve is absurd and totally disconnected from the reality of the challenges involved in building software. Even the best, and most respected engineers write code that is riddled with bugs, and there are CVEs to prove it.

Engineering tools and new paradigms weren't invented to add friction and police developers, they were invented to aid our very real, human cognitive limits in writing software. If anything some of these things make the process more enjoyable and far less error prone.




I think that a lot of the tools and processes that we use these days are counter-productive overall.

I think that a lot of rules enforced by code linters are rules that are good 90% of the time, but they're bad 10% of the time.

Having 100% test coverage is great to guarantee that the software behaves like it's supposed to but it's terrible when you want to change that behavior in the near future. Most systems should be built to handle change. Having 100% test coverage disincentivizes change; especially structural changes.

Also, more advanced project management tools like Jira don't actually add value to projects; they just give dumb executives the illusion of having more visibility into the project - Unfortunately, they cannot really know what's going on unless they understand the code.


I don't disagree that things like testing are overdone. I'm currently consulting on a project that was largely written by another consultant who was fanatical about TDD. Most of the code was very poorly structured, but had hundreds of brittle tests (where it wasn't exactly clear what was even being tested). Since this project is still pretty new, one of the first decisions we made was to disable the tests and do a major refactoring (then rewrite maybe half of the tests). As a result we've been much more productive and the app is if anything _more_ stable now and much easier to understand.

And I agree that project management tools (especially JIRA) are pretty frustrating and provide a dubious value proposition. Project management is going to need to have a reckoning some day w/ the fact that it's very difficult to glean any insight from estimates and velocity (and that very few places actually even measure these things in a consistent fashion). The only value to "agile" and the ecosystem surrounding it IMO is that it de-emphasized planning to some extent and pushed the importance of communication. These are ultimately human problems though, not ones that can be solved by technology. Also I think there's a laughably small amount of interest in giving software engineers the time to train and learn.

Software engineering as a discipline is still in the dark ages. We don't really have solid data on the impact of things like programming language choice, development methodologies, etc. Most of the conceived wisdom about these things is from people who are trying to sell their services as consultants and offer project management certifications. That's not to say that there is no value in tools, techniques, language features, etc. to software engineering, there's a huge value, but we need to better understand how contingent the advantages to these decisions are.

As always, I think the things en vogue in software engineering are somewhat of a wash. I'm very happy that statically typed functional programming languages have seen a resurgence because I think they offer an enormously better alternative to TDD-ing your project to death by allowing you to make error states unrepresentable and discouraging mutable state (also I think encoding invariants in types actually makes it faster to adapt to changing requirements, especially w/ the refactoring abilities in editors). On the other hand, there are lots of bad ideas about architecture and scaling today, particularly with the "microservice" trend and I think people poorly understand how these things were mostly created as a response to organizational growth, not per se in search of better performance or some kind of invariant best practices about architecture.

In any case, I think there is an inherent tension w/ management that has indirectly lead to some of these practices, but I would push back on the idea that we only adapt some of these to satisfy management. Tools that push you towards correct and safe code IMO make the job less anxiety-inducing and gives your code a chance to actually meet the expectations users invest in your project by using it. In my experience these are the kinds of things management couldn't care less about until it impacts their profitability.




Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: