Reflecting on the Soul of a New Machine
I struggled with this a few times: “When a person signed up to do a job for him, he would in turn trust that person to accomplish it; he wouldn’t break it down into little pieces and make the task small, easy and dull.”<p>I’m not particularly talented, far from it actually, but many times I’ve worked in teams with non-junior people who were tasked to do some portion of a project, and simply delivered garbage: a terribly over engineered solution in a component where over engineering was actually very dangerous (e.g. doing distributed systems using several small bespoke moving parts rather than a single solid leader election mechanism, or even better getting away with something leaderless and more elegantly stateless, to give a recent example).<p>In those occurrences, I inevitably “broke it down to pieces” by keeping pointing out all the exact scenarios where the code delivered would fail, until the other person really had to finally move to a solution much more similar to the one I had in mind (much much simpler). Sometimes this required an embarrassing feedback loop of 10+ round trips, where every time I’d just look at the newly delivered code say “this doesn’t work in a X scenario”. And I was not in a better position from a knowledge perspective, we were essentially peers.<p>I felt like a prick and definitely felt resentment from the other party (especially since code reviews are public), but at the same time, how could I have acted differently? The end result was really orders of magnitude better, more robust and smaller.