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1070 points dondraper36 | 1 comments | | HN request time: 0.212s | source
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codingwagie ◴[] No.45069135[source]
I think this works in simple domains. After working in big tech for a while, I am still shocked by the required complexity. Even the simplest business problem may take a year to solve, and constantly break due to the astounding number of edge cases and scale.

Anyone proclaiming simplicity just hasnt worked at scale. Even rewrites that have a decade old code base to be inspired from, often fail due to the sheer amount of things to consider.

A classic, Chesterton's Fence:

"There exists in such a case a certain institution or law; let us say, for the sake of simplicity, a fence or gate erected across a road. The more modern type of reformer goes gaily up to it and says, “I don’t see the use of this; let us clear it away.” To which the more intelligent type of reformer will do well to answer: “If you don’t see the use of it, I certainly won’t let you clear it away. Go away and think. Then, when you can come back and tell me that you do see the use of it, I may allow you to destroy it.”"

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ricardobeat ◴[] No.45069348[source]
At least half the time, the complexity comes from the system itself, echoes of the organizational structure, infrastructure, and not the requirements or problem domain; so this advice will/should be valid more often than not.
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malux85 ◴[] No.45069454[source]
I was one of the original engineers of DFP at Google and we built the systems that send billions of ads to billions of users a day.

The complexity comes from the fact that at scale, the state space of any problem domain is thoroughly (maybe totally) explored very rapidly.

That’s a way bigger problem than system complexity and pretty much any system complexity is usually the result of edge cases that need to be solved, rather than bad architecture, infrastructure or organisational issues - these problems are only significant at smaller, inexperienced companies, by the time you are at post scale (if the company survives that long) then state space exploration in implementation (features, security, non-stop operations) is where the complexity is.

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1. wrs ◴[] No.45070057[source]
My rule on edge cases is: It's OK to not handle an edge case if you know what's going to happen in that case and you've decided to accept that behavior because it's not worth doing something different. It's not OK to fail to handle an edge case because you just didn't want to think about it, which quite often is what the argument for not handling it boils down to. (Then there are the edge cases you didn't handle because you didn't know they existed, which are a whole other tragicomedy.)