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by akshatpradhan 917 days ago
The situation you described doesn’t sound like “Right Way Guys”. It actually sounds like “Bikeshedding” [1]. This means giving a disproportionate amount of attention or importance to the trivial details while neglecting or giving less attention to the significant issues.

Imagine a committee commissioned to approve plans for a Nuclear Power Plant. But the committee spends all their time discussing the color of the bike shed that they want built nearby.

In your case, their focus on separate VMs for QA/Production, systemd deployments, templating system for a few strings, and an ORM for a few SQL queries, especially for a project with a limited user base (10 people) really exemplifies Bike-shedding.

They’re emphasizing minor, arguably unnecessary details rather than the core functionality or purpose of the project [2]. This usually occurs because these trivial aspects are easier to understand and discuss, especially for junior devs, which leads to increased involvement on minor details while the more meaningful parts of a project (which might be more challenging to address), are overlooked or given less attention.

IMO, a good leader knows how to strike a balance between the “Right Way” and avoiding the pitfalls of “Bike-shedding”.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_triviality

[2] I would argue complete documentation of the meaningful parts of the project is not bike-shedding.

6 comments

Bikeshedding is the act of debating trivial details. They're just overcomplicating something that should be simple, but it doesn't seem like there was much of a debate about it at the time, so it's not bikeshedding.
It sounds more like a case of "Use the tools you know". Like, the stated ORM toolkit may be complete overkill, but if they don't have experience doing object relational mapping by hand that's one more thing to learn to get the job done. The asserted goal is to deliver something for a group of people to use, so it's not a hobby of trying to find as many new lessons to learn as possible.
I see it funny when this behavior is assigned as one of symptoms of quite quitting, and Allies advice to rebellious German workers in WW2.
Sounds more like scope creep (due to "Right Way") rather than arguing about details.
Not having separate VMs for QA and Prod seems like madness to me
which model regurgitated this reply ?