Ben Nadel: Only Solve One Problem at a Time

Re:Ben Nadel: Only Solve One Problem at a Time by flappyeagle on Thursday November 10, 2022 @03:10PM (#33552491)

  - It works. You need to add 16 things. You add 1 thing at a time. 16 operations later you are good but the deadline has passed. Fired.

  - It works. Add 16 things. It doesn't work. Remove 8 things. It works. You've eliminated 8 culprits. 4 operations later done. Delivered on time. Get a promotion.

  - One donut left. 2 programmers went into the break room. No donuts left. Who ate it? Not any of the 30 programmers outside of the break room. Ask the 2 programmers who did it. Prisoner's dilemma. Fun had by all.

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Re:Ben Nadel: Only Solve One Problem at a Time by tonyarkles on Thursday November 10, 2022 @04:24PM (#33553604)

Having done this for a number of years now, I’d argue that your first point is based on a false premise. Adding each thing one at a time feels slower because you don’t get the frantic rush from doing 16 things at the same time on a tight deadline, but most of the time end-to-end it takes the same amount of time or less, because when something does break it’s super easy to look at the one thing you did and fix it without having to suck in the entire context of the 16 things.

If you’re doing all 16 at the same time and they’re not one liner trivial things, how do you even know where exactly the 8 from your divide-and-conquer strategy are? And can you actually back them out without further breaking things?

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Re:Ben Nadel: Only Solve One Problem at a Time by aliswe on Friday November 11, 2022 @02:10AM (#33558061)

I like this, especially the first point. I would just like to point out that the "fired." part doesn't have to be a real threat, a perceived (or even subconscious) threat is sufficient to generate the effect.

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