Reply to post: Re: Exam question.

Re: Exam question.

To some extent, that's true. Still, there are situations where you can't get people to tell you why you're doing something. It's entirely logical, if told to sort a box of bolts, to do so. After all, if the person telling you to do that just wanted the biggest one, they could either have taken it out at the beginning or asked you to find one with the required specifications.

Sometimes, you want someone to just do what you ask of them rather than to believe they can do it better if only they know everything there is to know about what you're doing. For example, if I ask someone to find the most cost-efficient machine with a set of specifications, I only want them to look at the options, eliminate those that have worse specifications, and choose the one that has the lowest cost (perhaps taking into account other things that they can definitely ask me to elucidate). I do not need them to question me as to whether I want more power because they found one that's only a little more expensive, nor do I need them to suggest that we'd probably be fine if we bought machines with less memory. I set forth the specifications and gave them a task. If they're going to change the task instead of just doing it, perhaps they should be doing my job.

The same is true of software jobs. I cannot deal with every part of a project team thinking they can and should be designing a better system for every component. Their system for some of it may in fact be better than the one we're using, but if it doesn't integrate and won't without doing a lot of work first, it can still be worse. And if each team or team member comes up with their own version that doesn't interact, we spend forever getting things back together. That's why abstraction is so key; figure out the best way to do your job, not the best way for someone else to do theirs or even for you to do someone else's job. If you have some improvements to suggest, go ahead, but don't neglect what you're supposed to be doing just because you don't like someone else's work.