Item — HN Reader

> I entered the workforce about 9 months ago

Right or wrong, it takes a certain amount of chutzpah to put forth such a definite opinion after less than a year in the workforce.

What OP probably misses is the "there ain't nothing so permanent as a temporary solution" thing. I too embrace quick and dirty solutions but only if I have total control over the lifetime of that solution. If someone's going to ask me to deliver it immediately and then build a castle on top of it... I might insist on using a tool that has more up front cost.

2 comments

Yeah, that line made me nearly laugh out loud.

Not saying the author isn't onto something: using the simplest tool that will get your job done -- and bonus points if you can reasonably use the same tool for several things -- is a decent principle to live by. Using an existing tool is great, when it meets your needs without too many difficult trade offs.

And where they work, it seems like business requirements are scrapped and rewritten every couple months, so the whole "temporary-haha-yeah-right solution" problem doesn't really rear its head.

The rest of us have to deal with the difficult mess several years down the line, because "we'll throw it away and write a new thing once we need to scale" is something that very rarely actually happens.

Of course, the author has no experience of a year down the line, let alone several years down the line.

I particularly enjoyed the “every couple of months…” bit. So, about four times?

'zactly :D I don't want to be too harsh though; I definitely think the attitude of rolling out something simple that works is a solid approach when compared with the gold-plated second-system-syndrome thinking that's terribly easy to fall into. They're not wrong wrong, but there's a bit more nuance to be had once you've seen the monsters that can grown out of a hasty prototype.