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by bryanlarsen 478 days ago
> I’ve also done POCs of work that has been met with resistance that I didn’t feel was justified in order to actually give it a fair shake. That is my coding fun.

I've had managers do this to me. What an awful experience. Because they're the manager you can't push back against the awful design decisions they made. They feel it's almost done so don't understand that it takes a lot of time to deal with all the side effects they didn't consider.
2 comments
scarface_74 478 days ago
A POC should just be a happy path to prove a concept. I had a CTO who would routinely throw together code just to prove out an integration or another concept with hard coded values everywhere and drop the code in Dropbox for me to lead the effort of making it production ready as the architect. He would go back and forth with the vendor until things worked.

This helped me out by leaps and bounds. I was usually swamped with other research. I would then make it ready for production or lead the team to and take care of the edge cases, integration with our config system, logging and alerting, etc.

There is a huge difference between a POC and an MVP. An MVP should be properly designed and scaffolding that you can build on, a POC doesn’t take those things into account.

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LeafItAlone 478 days ago
That’s very valid feedback.

I hope I don’t come across that was and do have some evidence (not to be laid out here) supporting that I don’t.

I think I’ve created a team and structure where the developers I manage are comfortable telling me I’m wrong or what I didn’t consider. It happens weekly. We value honest feedback highly. We do it with respect, but we do it.

We just have some developers on the team that are resistant to ideas that don’t follow a pattern until they see it. And sometimes my communication around the initial idea is poor and the best way I can communicate is an implementation.

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james_marks 478 days ago
As with virtually everything in this thread, it matters how you do it. Sounds like you did it well.

I’ll add one other great edge in building a quick POC yourself. Sometimes your idea actually _is_ bad, and trying to articulate it in code helps you see it.

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