Dan Luu
patreon
Writing down the most obvious things
🕑 Added 2021-11-15 03:41:39 +0000 UTCA while back, I convinced Jamie Brandon to write down "obvious stuff" he's learned about programming effectiveness over time that he thought was too obvious to write down (we have a weekly call where we chat about various ideas and my suggestion was just to publish the thoughts he had).
More recently, I've been writing down very obvious things (https://danluu.com/why-benchmark/ https://danluu.com/look-stupid/ https://danluu.com/productivity-velocity/ https://danluu.com/learn-what/ ). I find it sort of funny that it took talking to Jamie about him writing down obvious stuff and then seeing him do it get me to do it since the same reasons I gave him for writing down obvious things also apply to me. Sure, they're pretty obvious, but most of the discourse out there actually advocates for less obvious and, IMO, generally worse practices.
One question I have is why such a large fraction of posts and talks out there are about ideas that aren't as obvious and, IMO, also aren't as good. One theory Jamie had was that less obvious stuff "sells" better because it sounds less obvious, but by the reaction Jamie and I have gotten to our obvious stuff, I don't think that can be a complete explanation. I certainly agree that there's a kind of clever, contrarian, and wrong, idea that generally gets a lot more traction than one might naively expect if one were judging based only on correctness, but very obvious stuff can also have very broad appeal.
Another question is, why is it that internet comments, which are frequently quite critical, don't more frequently point out the obvious stuff that works when discussing posts advocating ideas that are less obvious and less effective.
A simple explanation would be that these things aren't so obvious after all, but I don't think that holds up when the ideas are things like "working faster allows you to get more work done in the same amount of time". That seems so obvious that it's almost hard to believe that someone would argue that velocity doesn't matter, but I only wrote that post because the most widely read thought leaders kept arguing that velocity doesn't matter, e.g., https://twitter.com/b0rk/status/1367172498954059791 .
One explanation that appears to hold some of the time is that a lot of people seem highly motivated to justify the status quo. In cases where someone writes about practices at a company and I have intimate knowledge of how things came to be, someone will frequently say something like "gosh, that seems really silly, why didn't they do [some much simpler thing that would have prevented some very bad problems]?". Commenters will then respond with something like "X has great engineering, don't you think they would've thought of that? There must be a deeper reason they didn't do it that you don't understand". Sometimes the comments go further and fabricate a specific explanation for what happened that's completely unrelated to the true explanation.
Most of the time, there is no deeper reasonable reason (some reasons might be that the company had a lot of inexperienced engineers who didn't have the idea to do the more reasonable thing or that the organization that owns the problem is incompetent and constantly scores own goals).
That seems like it could be a sufficient explanation for internet comments, but I don't feel like it's really sufficient to explain the blog post and talk situation.
Comments
Oh, interesting. It looks like Patreon includes the period in the link. Thanks for pointing that out!
This essay is characteristically great. Thanks. (FWIW, the link to the "velocity doesn't matter" tweet is broken.)
“Working faster” might have externalities like getting tired faster. If I could work faster without burning out I would 100% take it. My hunch is that some examples fall into this category, like improving debugging tools and typing speed. But if I need to make 5x non-trivial decisions in the same amount of time I would get more tired at the end.
