[deterministic]

I notice this all the time in software development. A majority of developers would rather spend months or years doing the obvious (but slow) thing rather than spend a few days thinking hard and then implemented a simple solution instead.

The latest example I noticed is a colleague at work who spent more than a year hand converting thousands of SQL scripts from Oracle to Postgress. Instead of simply parsing the Oracle scripts and auto translate them.

Another example I have seen are developers hand coding messages and message protocols and DB schemas etc. instead of auto generating everything from a declarative spec.

Hot tip: Almost 90% of the code you need in a typical biz applications can be auto generated. Yes it does require that you think hard about the architecture you use. But it is worth it!

A third example I have noticed are developers spending years rewriting their code to work in the cloud, followed by years of work rewriting the code away from the cloud because of cost. We are talking years of wasted work.

A fourth example is a developer painstakingly hand converting a Java protocol to C++ instead of using Java reflection to automate it.

I could go on and on and on. It’s crazy.