Today I want to talk about bad engineers, and one aspect of them in particular - solution favouritism. But first, let me remind you again how engineer

Favouring Tools is Bad Engineering

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2021-07-25 06:00:06

Today I want to talk about bad engineers, and one aspect of them in particular - solution favouritism. But first, let me remind you again how engineering is supposed to work. You get a problem - this could be anything - you might need a new database, a new frontend framework, a new package manager, or even more abstract, you might need a new way to show data to a user when it’s convenient for them. Heck, it could even be not software, you need water to come out of a tap, you need a new shower unit, you need a bridge to cross a river, you need to provide electricity to a remote region. Then, you go deep on the problem. You look at the sub-problems, the unique constraints to this field, your company, your people and team, your future plans, your past plans, and much much more. These all matter. From there, you try some solutions. You try each solution you can think of in turn, with small proof of concepts (POC) or experiments, and eventually you see what works best. You might rule some out because they’re not working well with your unique constraints. You might test others even further. This is where some knowledge of solutions can come in handy, but more on that later. From there, you settle ties. If one solution seems pretty much the same as the other, you keep going. Find other unique constraints until a clear winner emerges. From there, you can go on to implement the solutions. If you find issues, then your POC wasn’t good enough, and you need to go back a step. It happens. It’s fine. And that’s it, thats a (simplified) way to do solve problems as a good engineer.

Bad engineering is going into a problem solving phase with a bias towards your favourite potential solution. This is absolutely absurd yet it happens all the time, especially in software engineering and especially online. This is becoming too common online, and it’s super super sad to see. Let me list some phrases which I think are signs of bad engineering:

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