Comments on: The Complicator’s Gloves

By: Credit card machine processing

Credit card machine processing — Sun, 22 Aug 2010 14:58:30 +0000

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By: Jake

Jake — Wed, 22 Oct 2008 08:06:14 +0000

It's funny, as much as we crave simplicity, software tends to become difficult, especially as you build onto previous versions.

I wonder what would happen if you completely threw out backward compatibility and supported data migration only, how much better (or worse) software would be?

By: chet

chet — Wed, 22 Oct 2008 07:16:22 +0000

Love the pics. Wish I had a camera back in the day when we would pile 5 kegs in the back of my jeep for football weekends. I lived this close to the football stadium.

Obsessive is good. I am obsessive to the point where I can't sleep until I solve a particular problem.

What the story tries to illustrate I think, are those that take it way too far. A colleage of mine once relayed a story to me and it goes like this:

A small two man county shop with a public facing website. APEX? Nope. .NET application (not so bad in and of itself) with an Oracle backend. In order to add a column to a simple report (4 seconds in APEX), their change consisted of:
1. Add the column to the function that returned a ref cursor.
2. Add the column to a stylesheet (not sure why, XSLT?)
3. Add the column to the .NET class
4. Add the column to the calling application
* I'm pretty sure there were others, I just can't recall all the steps. Point is, there were a lot.

2 man shop. County. Wouldn't simple be better? Yes it would be ideal to have the presentation layer loosely coupled with the data layer or even the middle tier. But is that practical?

This guy created a behemoth of an application either because he didn't know any better (probably) or he was trying to create job security (less likely, I think).

Keep It Simple Silly (Stupid). That should be our mantra (unless the situation dictates otherwise, i.e. software that could kill you, applications that control planes, NASA)

By: Jake

Jake — Sat, 18 Oct 2008 11:29:50 +0000

I'm not seeing the Complicator in your story. Creativity isn't the mark of the Complicator, at least how I read it.

Maybe we missed the backstory on the gloves, e.g. maybe they were too bulky to work the bike brakes. So, assume the story is borderline.

The Complicator creates meta-problems, e.g. "a problem with the process of creating a solution for the actual problem". There's a difference between creativity, intense focus and meta-problems. The complicator may exhibit all three, but it's his/her penchant for meta-problems that can derail a project.

By: joel garry

joel garry — Sat, 18 Oct 2008 04:38:06 +0000

I was at one electronics manufacturing company that was transitioning from entrepreneurial to mainstream. They would still let the engineers work on creative things. The director of engineering came up with an idea - a device that would take ambient sound, perform a fast fourier transform on it, mix up the bits, and echo it back out after a short delay, sounding like r2-d2. They created a run of chips, had all girlfriends and wives donate empty L'Eggs containers (about 100 IIRC), put little feet and faces on them, and gave them to favored friends. Not a big deal in these days of dancing flowers, but quite the novelty circa 1980. I really wish I had scored one. The fellow who did the FFT later wrote Lisatalk and other famous things. And you shoulda seen the security system around and through the director's house.

Moral? Complicators are indeed useful, both for increasing team cohesion and exercising creativity that can be a foundation for future endeavors.

And if you've ever had insufficient gloves, you might not agree with the wtf.

How many of us have had a PHB way oversimplify a design because, hey, dbase didn't have all these complicated relational rules?

By: bex

bex — Fri, 17 Oct 2008 23:41:27 +0000

Thank you for the email!

I will be traveling this week, with limited access to email. I will reply when I return.

--

Brian 'Bex' Huff <bex@bexhuff.com>
Chief Software Architect, Bezzotech Inc.
Developing applications with Stellent? You might find my book useful:
http://bexhuff.com/books/stellent-dev

By: Jake

Jake — Fri, 17 Oct 2008 23:40:22 +0000

I'm agreeing that obsession is generally good, e.g. when it automagically orders you a refill keg. This general idea has teams at big electronics companies churning out smart appliances for the kitchen of the future.

I'm guessing that only Complicators exhibit the combination of intense focus on meta problems. Most developers I've known are pretty good at seeing the forest, at least in other's work, e.g. peer programming.

By: bex

bex — Fri, 17 Oct 2008 10:41:29 +0000

Its not a bad thing that developers get obsessive… frankly, that's why they are so valuable. However, it is a humbling reminder that intense focus almost always means a loss of high-level perspective…