[cnnsucks]

Because your "5 minutes" is pure bullshit and your engineer knows it.

Your engineer knows that if she writes your "5 minute" query without careful analysis, peer review and documentation and the query ever produces a questionable result --- whether it was anticipated by your requirements or not --- it's your engineers ass; you'll throw your engineer under the bus _instantly_.

Your engineer knows that if she writes your "5 minute" query and it produces any actual value you'll be back the next day with a "5 minute" enhancement. Anything you ask for that might matter the next day has to be built to be maintained by others because if she happens to take the day off when you show up and demand a revision to your "5 minute" wonder query and there is nothing for the other engineers to go on (revision controlled work, documentation, etc.) then that's her ass; she knows you won't stand up for her.

Your engineer didn't just fall out of the boat and is in no hurry to obligate herself to take responsibility for your adhoc miracle queries and the questions that will emerge when you go waving the output under everyone's nose, and she knows that's exactly what you'll do with it. Your little query is your view of the world and that view is highly unlikely to survive the first bit of scrutiny that's applied by anyone other than yourself, much less the second.

[hermitdev]

I had a veteran DBA close to retirement (she was my cube-mate) warn me about this when I was an intern. I had a very simple request come in to update some data. Didn't even take 5 minutes. She told me: never do the simple tasks immediately. Sit on them for a bit. Business users don't understand complexity of different tasks and think they should all take the same amount of effort. So, if you do one thing in just a few minutes, they'll expect everything to take the same amount of time. In my experience, it's proved to be true.

[technofiend]

I heard a story from an ex-wall-street engineer who related he was once asked to fix a message passing system so that it could now pass something like 10 x as many messages per second that before. He rewrote it and it now passed 1000 x messages / sec. He almost turned it in that way and then realized he was undercutting his future self. So he backed off the improvements to the required 10 x. Sure enough he got a big bonus and kudos for his work and a year later he was asked if he could pull another miracle out of his hat. Indeed he could. He sat on it for weeks, updated one line of code and then got another big bonus. LOL.

[hencq]

Haha, that reminds me of the speed-up loop: https://thedailywtf.com/articles/The-Speedup-Loop

[matthewmacleod]

Maybe y'all want to read the article.