Re:Coding Horror: Hardware is Cheap, Programmers are Expensive
by geebee on Friday December 19, 2008 @01:35PM
(#403653)
That's really well put.
In this case, I'd say you need programmers to reduce the O(N^2), and hardware to reduce the K.
If you can reduce K by 50% for $5,000, then it makes almost no sense to use a programmer to reduce K. However, hardware will almost never save you from a programmer who gives you an O(N^2) instead of a log N solution.
This happened at my last job (actually, worse). Management decided I would be an "Architect" and train an offshore team to write the code (hmm... seems kind of fishy). We were building a system that would hold an equation with millions of constraints and variables, and we needed to be able to look up a variable value by name.
The code from the offshore team, no kidding, stored them in arrays. Unreal. I quit, for all kinds of reasons.
(yes, yes, many offshore teams could have written this code very well - the problem was not offshore programmers per se, it was that mgmt wanted top talent for cheap and was outsourcing its core product, and you don't get something for nothing).
In this case, I'd say you need programmers to reduce the O(N^2), and hardware to reduce the K.
If you can reduce K by 50% for $5,000, then it makes almost no sense to use a programmer to reduce K. However, hardware will almost never save you from a programmer who gives you an O(N^2) instead of a log N solution.
This happened at my last job (actually, worse). Management decided I would be an "Architect" and train an offshore team to write the code (hmm... seems kind of fishy). We were building a system that would hold an equation with millions of constraints and variables, and we needed to be able to look up a variable value by name.
The code from the offshore team, no kidding, stored them in arrays. Unreal. I quit, for all kinds of reasons.
(yes, yes, many offshore teams could have written this code very well - the problem was not offshore programmers per se, it was that mgmt wanted top talent for cheap and was outsourcing its core product, and you don't get something for nothing).