[xorcist]

> I wonder if people find older developers miss obvious solutions that involve throwing small amounts of money and/or hardware at business problems,

I regularly see the exact opposite: People throwing money and hardware at problems instead of doing the simple and obvious thing. I guess that makes me officially old.

[peteretep]

    > People throwing money and hardware at
    > problems instead of doing the simple
    > and obvious thing

There are (almost) no technical problems, just business decisions. Programmer time for development and maintenance is expensive. Hardware is decreasingly so (also it's CapEx, so nobody cares if you literally light it on fire).

[wmccullough]

I find this too. Even the so-called proprietary algorithms many companies tout aren't even that complicated because 90% of their business runs on a REST over CRUD in SQL web service with a slightly different bootstrap theme on the frontend.

[xorcist]

See, now you fell for the same fallancy. Something that is smart must surely be more expensive, but this is seldom true. A method that is simple is easier to describe, easier to implement and could very well be more performant than a more complicated one.

[eru]

You can often see a bit bump in complexity when going from single computer to some kind of cluster environment (be that hadoop or similar). That complexity also often decreases efficiency.

So it can be useful to think a bit to be able to stay on one machine.

But making those trade-offs is exactly what engineering is about, and what's hard. So talking in the very abstract is seldom useful.