[netcan]

Reality is also confusing.

People can see that in a one day hackathon, the same bunch of people can produce more stuff than they do in a year otherwise. Why? Are they lazy? Did they use better tools?

My niece Shelly added address book integration to her hobby app in an afternoon, while drunk. WhyTF are we 640 man hours deep into "identity architecture coordination" meetings?!! Just do with Shelly did!

Those things don't make total sense, even to even the saltiest of developers. They know to expect it, but can't understand it. Neither can I, honestly. It's not surprising this gets so many people.

A lot of the hairy, abstract rabbit holes we climb into (whether organisation, like agile, or architectural, like microservices) are an attempt to solve the "100+100=6, wtf!" problem.

[blablabla123]

I guess that's the difference between proper Engineering and hacking something quickly and under self-inflicted pressure together. Your nieces app might work on her setup but not on others and may need almost a complete rewrite on an OS/API update. The properly engineered solution on the other hand might "just work" for years. I think key is to realise how much engineering is needed on what occasion. I find it disturbing when a simple app has highly sophisticated error handling unit tests as I would find it disturbing to find 30kLOC code bases with no unit tests, completely random spaghetti architecture and no explicit error handling.

[closeparen]

No, self-inflicted communication overhead due to a bloated bureaucracy is not what separates engineering from hacking.

[blablabla123]

I guess it depends on the company. But most of the time it seems bloated bureaucracy is a symptom of dysfunctional work relationships. When people know what to expect from each other and stuff "just works", then there is no need for any such thing and indeed you probably won't find it I think

[i_made_a_booboo]

Best comment ever.

Especially as I'm sitting here learning ASP.NET Core Identity on Pluralsight for hours and thinking about all the "identity architecture coordination meetings" I'm anticipating having on this next project.

[dwaltrip]

> My niece Shelly added address book integration to her hobby app in an afternoon, while drunk.

We shouldn't downplay this achievement. That is impressive!

I agree with you that reality is very confusing. I think much suffering is caused by not fully embracing this fact. I don't mean to be defeatist. On the contrary, this great confusion presents a vast landscape for potential improvements.