alt Hacker NewsThe whole car example is flawed because insufficient does not mean wrong or incorrect.
> And in the case of Chet, you have prioritized NOTHING. You still have no idea of what Chet was raising. You have no idea of what are the risks. You have no idea if your current plan is even the correct plan or not.
Why are you so sure the author cannot compare <complicated thing> and <simple thing>? Or he has not considered <complicated thing> before even Chet and discarded it?
> When Chet come up, he is saying "hey, I think I notice we are planning to build something that has absolutely no value"
You’re again inventing stuff. The simple thing has value today. It will be insufficient in three weeks. It is not insufficient today. If we implement it, the user will have a working solution way sooner instead of waiting for the complicated thing to be ready.
How do you value your user’s time?
> The important thing is not "the task of today", it is to deliver what the user needs.
What the user needs today and what it will need in three weeks are different things. You and Chet have been ignoring the user’s need for today.
If someone wants some data outside of a system and you can write a quick perl script in 30 minutes to produce a CSV, you do it. You don’t argue about setting up a whole ETL pipeline because that will be needed in 3 weeks and the perl script is insufficient. Especially when that pipeline will take days to implement. You can have a whole set of examples and what not. But we can discuss that after the perl script is written and the needed data is exported.
> The whole car example is flawed because insufficient does not mean wrong or incorrect.
In the car example, the solution proposed by the team leader is insufficient. The result is that the solution proposed by the team leader will lead to either the project to fail or to a waste of money.
> Why are you so sure the author cannot compare <complicated thing> and <simple thing>?
What are you talking about? I'm not saying you cannot compare <complicated thing> and <simple thing>, I'm saying that the author does NOT COMPARISON: he has no idea what Chet is talking about, because Chet want to explain and the author shut him down.
You cannot say that Chet's solution, which is more complicated, is less valuable than the simple solution, because you don't even know if the simple solution has any value.
> The simple thing has value today.
No, YOU DON'T KNOW THAT. You invent that. Take the car example: having a wheel but no engine has no value. There are ton of other examples: for example, if someone is talking about a bug that occur because in three weeks we are in 2026 and that the code has a bug that make the code unusable if the year is 2026. If the product is released in February 2026, then the simple thing has zero value. (that's a made-up example for the sake of simplicity, but having bad design that destroy the quality soon after is a real thing, very common)
> How do you value your user’s time?
And how do you value users leaving because in 3 weeks that see the product is not able to do something they were expecting?
> What the user needs today and what it will need in three weeks are different things.
You don't know that. In the example of the car, the user don't need a 1 wheel car with no engine.
Again, because you have no idea what Chet is talking about, you have no idea if what Chet is talking about impacts today's users.
> blablabla ETL blablabla
You keep giving example where someone over-engineer (or ask for working on something too early, or ask to work on something out of scope, or ask to adapt the current goal based on hypothetical future goal, ...). EVERYONE HERE agrees that this is bad and should be avoided. The disagreement is that in the dialog in the article, the author did a terrible job at assessing if Chet contribution was a good or a bad thing (based on these criteria), because the author has drunk the YAGNI cool-aid and jumped to the conclusion it was a bad thing while there are plenty of situations where Chet will act exactly like that when it is not some of these bad things.
(and again, my criticism is not these "bad" things are not bad and should not be avoided, my criticism is that some devs say "YAGNI" and shut down the contributions that are fully relevant to do a good job and deliver value. A simple solution is to not be an obnoxious d*khead and just listen to Chet, to check if it is a real bad thing or not, and act accordingly like an adult instead of behaving like a little kid)
PS: I note that you just ignore elements where you cannot answer. (for example, the food that you don't buy one item at the time, the fact that "prioritization" means nothing when you don't even know between what and what you are prioritizing, ...)