Re:Software Complexity Is Killing Us
by alkonaut on Tuesday January 30, 2018 @03:53AM
(#16263854)
Exactly this. Software is complex because users have complex needs, or more specifically: users have varying needs and the union of those needs is complex.
Also: quality and dev cost are always factored in and complexity wins. As a developer I always argue for the simple, clean, maintainable, performant solution - but the business need of the customer is such that they’d nearly always rather have the slow, expensive, buggy and bloated solution (that is - given the choice at fixed cost). Even after pressuring customers on this - the answer in my experience is always “yes we accept poor performance, poor reliability so long as the features are there. Make it complex, we’ll pay for it with money and we’ll pay for it with accepting poor quality. Go for 10 features working 80% rather than 3 features working perfectly”.
And the reason they want this? It’s because their existing apps (from the ”good old days”) might be fast and so simple it’s superficially bug free but it just doesn’t solve their problem. They have to do manual work instead and it’s costing them.
So in the end we are making apps with complexity so high that making them properly (I.e with the kind of thought and care that goes into e.g a compiler) would take at least ten times as long. But customers would reject that product either on cost or lack of features or both.
Also: quality and dev cost are always factored in and complexity wins. As a developer I always argue for the simple, clean, maintainable, performant solution - but the business need of the customer is such that they’d nearly always rather have the slow, expensive, buggy and bloated solution (that is - given the choice at fixed cost). Even after pressuring customers on this - the answer in my experience is always “yes we accept poor performance, poor reliability so long as the features are there. Make it complex, we’ll pay for it with money and we’ll pay for it with accepting poor quality. Go for 10 features working 80% rather than 3 features working perfectly”.
And the reason they want this? It’s because their existing apps (from the ”good old days”) might be fast and so simple it’s superficially bug free but it just doesn’t solve their problem. They have to do manual work instead and it’s costing them.
So in the end we are making apps with complexity so high that making them properly (I.e with the kind of thought and care that goes into e.g a compiler) would take at least ten times as long. But customers would reject that product either on cost or lack of features or both.