Today's best post on complexity to me was the I accidentally saved my company half a million dollars, which is a story filled yes with a lot of poor developers but much much worse is a story filled with Conway's Law style lessons. Of madcap organizations & wild legacy systems that we live atop & typically just have to make do with. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38069710 https://ludic.mataroa.blog/blog/i-accidentally-saved-half-a-...

So much of the grug-brained argumentation is same-side violence, is developers roasting developers. Assigning bad motives & declaring immoral bad people among us probably happens some, and various petty or criminal over engineering happens some too. But I usually think there are simpler Hanlon's Razor explanations that aren't even personal, are just the story of an org: an organizational body where so many constituent members of the body-whole have so little idea what others are doing or have done, and access to so few who can offer informed situational-appropriate wisdom for whatever dark end a squad finds itself tasked with.

In some ways, this has been the actual story of open source. We get to grow communities of practitioners with individual knowledge & experience that ports & can be compared & discussed with others, from outside our company. We get peership that companies can rarely afford or find after they grow mid-sized.

The Influx folks just talked about their 3.0, & replacing their custom built engine with Flight, DataFusion, Arrow, and Parquet. Maybe they might miss one box or two on neat nitty gritty optimizations (maybe this guy elsewhere in this thread, insisting diy'ing binary encodings because protobuf doesn't have 16-bit ints can find some deficiencies, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38078133), but the nice to haves of ecosystem integration seems like an intangible, but one that lets little good things out there plug in & help out, and that seems invaluable. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38013714 https://www.influxdata.com/blog/flight-datafusion-arrow-parq...

The top comment to me epitomizes the worst of grug brainedness. It's smug & certain of itself, a strong & divisive Hanlon's violation of high degree. That kind of blue-on-blue attitude to me is far worse than 99% of the people who end up over engineering. Few organizations have real defense, lack coherency, to help themselves away from complexity, or they have such tight constraints that they overprune & disaffect those who do care and have good ideas. These are organizational issues, and having an org that can somehow see itself & what's afoot is the huge challenge. Stop hating on devs, please.