Author: espen

A flock of sheep in a green grass field. The sheep are a bit dirty, but all looking at you.

Do engineers dream of endless complexity and problems in their sleep?

Yes, it is a “funny” word play on the legendary sci-fi novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? The title of this article is something I have had in the back of my mind since very early on in my career and it has stuck with me.

Note! If you are offended by swearing, bad language and grammar you will have a blast reading this article as it contains a lot of it 😂

🌟Green field projects

The bare mention of the word makes people have a certain glow in their eyes and can almost see their pulses rise. It’s that mythical thing that you have heard about while making your way through an endless maze of legacy code written by what has to be some programming illiterate that came before you.

It is you chance to Make Things The Right Way. You have dreamt of this moment for so long and now finally you are to be part of such a project.

The architecture diagram is a blank canvas. You have heard the phrase “we will use the best tool for the job on this one” uttered by managers. Deep inside you know this will be great.

Let’s gooooo! 🏎

There is a project kick-off and everyone is super excited. Everyone has been reading up on what is The Latest thing to be using. The room (virtual or physical, it doesn’t matter) is buzzing and spirits run high.

Designers, product manager and programmers alike have all arrived at the promised land together and it just feels amazing. This time, we know We Will Get It Right.

Fast forward, the project might be in an ok or it is in deep 💩. The outcome is not what I will be talking about here, it is rather the completely irrational way in which we go about setting up Something New.

Three steps for f**ng things up when starting something new

Pick technology based on what looks good on your resume and your personal preferences
Make sure you are ready for scale from the first moment
Focus on ensuring the programmers are enjoying themselves

CV Driven Development vs “WE ARE SO F**KED” Driven Development

CV Drive Development (CVDD) is a thing, heck I’ve practiced it for years early on in my career. Why wouldn’t you? If you work on dead-end technology, that means you career is heading in the same direction. Naturally we have a tendency to gravitate towards what makes us look good.

In a green field project, you absolutely have to have a grinch onboard. Someone to ensure that the team are not going completely ape-shit in the candy store just because they can.

A green field project should be treated as a startup, meaning you have zero money. It should’ve been done yesterday and investors are on your case to shut you down. That makes for a _great_ climate to make technology decisions. Why you say? Because it means you have to be honest and focused. No more CDD or reading blog posts about The Latest Thing. It’s about shipping value so you’re not shut down tomorrow. Most people would then choose Boring Technology. You choose something that you know, something that will give you velocity from day one and that is simple to work with.

Google Scale Baby 🚀

A project manager or some stakeholder early on in the projects would usually layout the possible future. How this project will be a game change and that it will be critical for the business ability to grow in the future. It is intended to inspire and rally the troops.

Again, this is where you need a Project Grinch on hand. We all pretend we know about premature optimization, but let’s be honest we mostly use that as an excuse to skip things like testing, performance and security considerations 🤷🏼‍♂️ In reality, since this is a Green Field Project, we secretly are already at Google Scale.

We choose tools, frameworks and technology platforms which are often times months if not years in the future. Let’s face it you don’t need to setup a Kubernetes Cluster and create your own Development Platform from day one. In fact what you could do is to host the damn app on an iPhone 8. Because: YOU HAVE NO USERS!

Our Inner Engineer just can’t be silenced. We so desperatley want to do “what the big boys are doing” that we just can’t wait to get there. Which is why, especially on green field projects, we just go all out over doing everything. Be it the git repo structure & the pull request regime or the runtime platform you choose.

Green Field projects very quickly become the new legacy because we are not thinking about the context we are in. We are not considering what are the things required for the things right in front of us.

Developer Experience

The phrase has been abused by so many people with such a variety of agendas that I feel the meaning of the word is gone years ago. It is also a term hailed by Propper Engineers as the ultimate goal of any software development organization. If this is not your #1 priority, you are doomed. DOOOMED! As the art of typing instructions for the computer to run is The Most Important Thing. In reality it is never the most important thing, as it is always the business which is important. If that is not on track an amazing developer experience don’t get you anywhere but a new job for the engineers.

The Project Grinch would say: “Oh really?”. In order to ship value there has to be an effective way to get things in front of customers / users. I am not debating this fact. What I am sure of is that this should not be the ultimate goal to have ready from month one. I would say it doesn’t need to be there for years 1 or 2 either. Again, in a Green Field project, we have a tendency to just loose it on this point. Because FINALLY we can set it up just right. We can have the quick builds, with the automated tests. End-to-end tests and integration tests. Feature environments for all branches. Database migrations with rollback. EVERY DAMN THING!

The task of writing the code is so precious and whatever small obstacle preventing us from doing this has to be eliminated. Preferably with something shiny and nice. Whatever the actual cost and whatever the increase in complexity, it needs to be done. Let’s do a mono-repo and then when that starts to hurt we will just add more technology on top of it. Something like NX (in the JS eco system) which sounds brilliant. We throw all the shiny tools in to remove ANY hints of friction to the sacred art of writing code (completely ignoring the added complexity that goes with removing said friction both short and long term).

Don’t get me wrong, having all this in place already _could_ be useful. However all these things also come at a cost which you might not want in an early stage project. Let’s say you have a feature environment setup ready, so why not Just Use It? Well, it might be that this setup requires you to do feature branches. Which effectively makes everything related to continuously delivering value to users harder (yes, I know you _can_ do CI/CD with feature branches too. What I am saying is that you probably should not).

A different approach would be to say: “scrap that, let’s do trunk based development“. You reduce the complexity in getting things shipped and you a healthy mindset of getting things out.

How to not fuck up

Ensure you always have someone who has no stake in having shiny technology on their resume
Ensure you have someone who knows that any projects success hinges on the business side of things first and foremost
Ensure you have someone on the project to tell the Engineers to “stop f**ing about”

You are welcome 🙇

Chains in the foreground and a setting sun in the background

On praise in the workplace

You were forced to work a lot to reach a milestone set by someone else. It could be for a number of reasons and often times it’s because someone made a mistake that these things happen (or the person in charge is an ass or an incompetent ass). You put all things on hold, dig in and put in the hours. Depending on how long this lasts , days, weeks or even months. Your physical and mental health starts deteriorating.
Your reward? Some mention on Slack. Pat on the back. Honorable mention in the weekly update. You get everything except compensation for your sacrifice. It is natural to feel a sense of joy and gratitude when seeing this, but you should not as it most like means you have been taken advantage or.

You ended up getting the short end of the stick here. In exchange for your own heath you got praise (while it should have been praise minus the p). Whoever needed you to perform this transaction most likely got a bigger reward. If it was a bad sell, often times the sales person still got their pay.

There are of course potential upsides in you becoming noticed, perhaps even getting promoted or receiving a raise down the line. You will get the appreciation of your peers, which is nice.

What you will not get is time to heal. Time to catch up on the things in your life that was sacrificed. Time to recover physically from the toll it took (some places you get time off to compensate for overtime, others not).

When you receive that praise. Don’t mistake that as a reward, it’s the documentation that you got the worse part of a deal someone else profited off of. You should not be happy, but angry. Your learnings should be: Never Again!

Wage labour is the transaction of someone renting your body in exchange for you applying your knowledge. When forced (and forced here could mean peer pressure, “the company’s future is at stake”, etc) to sacrifice more of you without actual real compensation you are giving away parts of you for free.

It is on the privileged to make the change happen

Yes, this is not quite that simple when the employer holds your families faith in their hands. When your stay in a country depends on your employment. If your income is used to support family and loved ones who can’t work. There are so many thing which makes this difficult.

The people I’m addressing with this post are the people with the privileges. We are the ones who can stand up and help others not have to do this deal with the devil.

We have little / nothing to loose and we should work hard against cultures of hollow compensation for heroics.

Fog Of War

Often times when working with developing software you get this urge to think “if it can do X, what about Y”. When thinking this you get this nice feeling inside and a sparkle in your eye. It’s the feeling of being A Proper Engineer. As the stereotype of one is that they are capable of future sight and gifted with the ability of crafting the most amazing designs up front by just Thinking Right.

We have this in us, most of us, I think. This longing to live up to this ideal. Even when I know it’s all a blatant lie and that Proper Engineers™ Stack Overflow just as much as the next person. Fighting this urge is very important, as it means your setting yourself up for iterating and leaving the door open for the shocking possibility that you might be working on The Wrong Thing 😱

Working in a team, you have some tasks in there here and now which are quite tangible. Then there are people taking about possible future enhancements and next steps. As a senior engineer you have the responsibility to ensure you stay on the here and now as often as possible. Pretend there is a Fog Of War around you as of in a computer game. Instead of constantly thinking about what could be in the fog. You should ensure the team is just gradually nudging forward uncovering small pieces at a time. Ensure the team has their focus on present and near future topics and then just keep an eye out on what’s lurking in the outskirts of the fog. This is what good engineers does and what seniors should help newcomers to embrace.

What I just talked about contradicts the urge mentioned in the beginning. Our longing for being Proper Engineers™. Embracing the fog of war and being comfortable with uncertainty is a far more important skill for a developer than The Future Sight of the Accomplished Engineer. Our surroundings change frequently and thinking too far ahead is both distracting and it often ends up being wasted time and money. As by the time you think you are about to embark on The Next Thing™, priorities change and you’ll never see the next thing.

Colorful wires going into a circuit board.

On reducing complexity

This is a common challenge once a company has built enough “stuff”. The burden of maintenance and the difficulties in refactoring makes one cry out for “Simplicity, now!’. A common perception of reducing complexity is to “dumb things down”, this is a reaction to the tension of it being difficult to untangle things. It’s often a good idea not to act on this tension, but look a bit further at the issue at hand.

Before even starting to consider doing anything, it is worth while to take a step back and analyse what exactly is complexity. People working together sometimes create established truths and create a shared understanding of how things are. Not based on research or analysis. There are multiple forces at play when a team starts talking about “too much complexity”. It can be a failure to deliver on their promises leading to a sense of failure and a need to place blame outside themselves. In companies with a hierarchy teams often create a lore of complexity as an explanation of why things are not going as planned. In the post The hidden meaning of complexity in the context of software development I talk about how the word complexity can mean something different entirely.

How to go about changing things?

One way to reduce complexity is to have to deal with less. Are there parts of the application which hardly ever changes? Would it make sense to split out isolated behavior from the main build? When doing this you can often get the counter argument of “we don’t want micro services!”. True, splitting out into separate might reduce some complexity and focused services that hardly gets deployed are great! However you can also isolate code which hardly change into libraries you compile in, reducing the number of things to build.

The misconception of thinking that reducing complexity always means removing or reducing things. You might actually reduce complexity by embracing new paradigms and undertake larger changes in your architecture. Doing this might require you to acquire new capabilities and learn new things, however this is not the same as adding complexity. Learning and evolving is always a key part of software development and should be just as natural to do when trying to reduce complexity.

Let’s say you have monolithic API which has grown out of control with long build times and a lack of efficient horizontal scaling, one way of reducing complexity could be to make drastic changes. Perhaps you need to insert a message queue and embrace an event based architecture? This might seem counter intuitive to reducing complexity , as setting this up is not that simple. However I would argue that often is this planned complexity preferable to the accidental complexity of a module which has grown out of control.

The means of production

When rescuing complexity an essential task is to look at the means of production, which is software is the delivery- and runtime infrastructure. Whatever path you choose in order to reduce complexity, it has to start here. If you continuous delivery system is fragile, or non existing, that is a place to start. If your infrastructure isn’t possible to replicate without manual procedures, that’s a thing to fix.

The reason for this is simple, no matter what you’re looking at doing it’ll be a nightmare if these things aren’t running smoothly. It will greatly reduce the types of things you can choose to do and it will also increase the time it will take to dig you out of the hole you are in.

Person standing in the entrance to a cave, with the light behind them. The lights is purple.

When opinions and theories are communicated as facts

This post contain learnings from over twenty years working as a programmer and close to half a century living on this planet.

I met my partner over a decade ago, not long into our relationship we had a conversation: “why do you say things as if you know them, when you don’t?” I would usually reply “Of course I don’t know these things. I’m obviously guessing, you should know this”. When I first was confronted by this I felt misunderstood and even a little attacked. Why would anyone assume I’d speak as if I know it all? I do not feel like I know better than most people, I am just very good at having opinions. My partner said that the way I sometimes say things makes other feel silly or make them loose confidence on their own beliefs. It’s not a good feeling. Again I try to defend myself saying “why would you assume I’m that kind of person? I’m not a know it all besserwisser!”.

We’ve had this conversations many times since, as this is something which is hard to shake for me even if I try to. This thing of speaking with authority, even if you’re just guessing. I used to say it was “because of my days as a consultant, when this was a requirement”. This was a very convenient and comfortable story to tell. It was circumstances beyond me which made me behave this way, it was not my fault.

Years have passed since this first conversation. During that time I have taken the opportunity to learn from and talk to many people. I have learned about privilege, I have learned about empathy and many other subjects I’ve never encountered in school or college.
I have come to understand that it wasn’t the “consultant in me” which made me speak a certain way. It’s the legacy or centuries of white male privilege echoed by me. The way I can casually say any statement without having to think twice. Not having to think it will have consequences for my job. That it will make others think less of me, or that there will be repercussions.

I still revert to talking about things as fact which are hunches / ideas. It takes a long time to correct this behaviour. Luckily I have people in my life who help correct me. I’m able to see when I do this and sometimes I manage to add “I think” at the end. However there is another thing which is also started to happen while leaning this, it’s that I see so many of my peer do this as well.

The consequences

This way of behaving can have serious consequences, affecting peoples mental health. Especially in scenarios were there the balance of power is unequal. The person on the receiving end will moderate themselves or just not say anything. They start to doubt themselves or simply accept what is said as truth without any further considerations. If this continues over time, the person with the power will slowly grind down others around then. Their belief in their abilities will deteriorate when in the presence of the person. They feel as if there’s not enough “air in the room” for them to contribute. The person with the power seldom see this and they start to feel that no one else can take their place because nobody speaks up, so they speak even louder. This is a self enforcing dynamic which slowly makes all collaboration and dialogue grind to a halt. As the person with the power gets more frustrated with “nobody says anything”, the situation ends up in a miserable deadlock.

Being on the receiving end of this behaviour over longer periods can cause serious problems that will take a long time to work out. The symptoms can be similar to that of people being bullied or having been in abusive relationships. Their personalities can change completely and it can lead to them not being able to work. How do I know? It happened to me and I’m still dealing with the aftermath, years after it happened.

The consequences for a company with individuals who has this behaviour can be severe. Important questions will not be asked and discussions will not be had. Because of the fear and dread of being belittled and made feel silly. These fears are the consequence caused by this behaviour. In the end people will end up leaving and there will be a bad atmosphere in the company until the matter is addressed or resolved in other ways. These sort of dynamics leads too many people leaving our industry through no will of their own, just to escape.

If you feel that this might be you. Or you maybe recognize some of the reactions from others, then here is what I suggest: work on yourself and find someone you trust who will give honest feedback to guide you. It will take you a long time to shed this behaviour, but it can be done. All it takes is for you to want to change. Add “I think”, “this is my opinion” or “I’m just guessing now” to certain statements.

It opens up the space for others, it shows vulnerability and empathy. In other words it make a world of difference just add these simple things to statements you make.

It’s takes some effort and introspection. It’s more hassle than just blurting things out. It might even be less efficient. However it is 100% the right thing to do towards your fellow humans.

Featured image by Luke Leung on Unsplash