29 September

On Simplicity, Complexity, and/or Bad Design

When I was first starting out in my career and I’d encounter a complicated system I couldn’t understand, I blamed my own inexperience.

Mid-career, I started to realize that, no, a lot of systems are just really poorly designed, and I was experiencing cognitive dissonance, trying to find a complex and subtle logic where there was none.

Now as I’m entering (eek) the late stages of my career, I’m experiencing those systems in a third way that I’m still trying to comprehend. It’s not specifically that they’re badly designed (though they may be). It’s that they’re necessarily convoluted because they’re trying to model an inherently convoluted human process.

No matter the skill of the developer, sometimes it’s just impossible to translate the messy, inconsistent, illogical, organically assembled, internally conflicted and occasionally politically-motivated* ways humans concoct to complete a task, into a simple, intuitive program.

Anyway… I just spent a half hour trying to make a little bit of sense of a system that had a clean and modern interface, but one that concealed an unbelievably arcane, niche-specific database model. Now my brain hurts.

*By “politically-motivated” I’m talking about internal politics within an organization, not government-level politics.

It’s only a “Panic” if you panic

Shady high-stakes gamblers using other people’s money Investment bankers getting their comeuppance is one thing. Global economic collapse is something else. This is only a Panic if we make it one. Fear begets fear, which leads to the populace en masse taking drastic steps we normally would not. Hyperbolic news reports become self-fulfilling prophecy.

Just say no. Kill the collapse by refusing to give in. And whatever you do, don’t give the swindlers another $700 billion to play with.