alt Hacker Newsif you hired a plumber, and asked him to fix the toilet, you expect him to fix the toilet.
You don't expect him to tell you your whole house's plumbing sucks, you have lead pipes and to properly fix the toilet you need to replace it all.
Just do the smallest, cheapest thing to fix the toilet.
Replace 'fix the toilet' with 'writing code', for programmers.
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I would absolutely love for the plumber whom I hired to fix my toilet to let me know what other crap I missed in my house's plumbing. Just doing the smallest, cheapest thing to fix the toilet is sometimes desirable but if it's just going to cause issues again soon, or if there are other issues I'm not aware of, I'd better at least start planning for those!
Handyman might be better analogue. And fixing should be either change some parts inside the toilet bowl or swap whole thing. What a software engineer would do is teardown bathroom with half a building and build a new annex with squat toilet...
But software engineers are tasked with solving business problems. Ofcourse writing code is part of it. But other things too, for example communicating with users to understand requirements better, which lead to a reduction in scope, which reduced the code to be written.
Or sometimes it is found that a good solution can be devised but which satisfies about 80 percent of the requirements, and it may be prudent to attempt to negotiate to remove the 20 percent requirements which cannot be satisfied.