Five Minutes

“I gave it five minutes of my undivided attention and I didn’t get it. It’s complicated and over-engineered”, that’s literally what he told me after looking at my work. I tried to explain the simple idea behind it but he didn’t want to listen. I made an example: “if you have a page of text in Russian and you don’t speak Russian, you can give it ten minutes of your attention, you still wouldn’t get what it’s about - doesn’t mean it’s complicated”. But the environment at that job was perfect to feed the arrogance of such people.

A week earlier

The first few weeks on the new team have passed. Tentative changes at the existing project were made. It was time to start my own project from scratch - much more fun than dealing with someone else’s (aka legacy) code. The old code that didn’t fare too well (common issue when an initial “simple” skeleton starts to meet messy reality, not quite capable of carrying all that weight) after the author left to do other things - the usual progression in the industry.

I had a good experience using a less known approach at my previous job. The idea (actors, for the ones who know) was simple and it was used in many different domains in the industry, so I felt fairly confident.

I sketched a proof of concept, building a small tool, so to speak, to use for the project. It looked good to me and to my colleague, who was actually responsible for the project. It was time to show it to a senior engineer, because hierarchy. That’s when I learned about the “five minutes” rule.

Years later

We pushed back against the senior engineer, as my colleagues saw the benefits of the new approach. Working together, we clearly defined our own flavor of the actors system, producing rules and guidelines for it. In the end, the project was a success.

Years later, I was still being told about how stable that component was. And even someone else successfully building a new component with the same idea.

I think this episode was the peak of arrogance I experienced in my career. That person was focusing on the application of an idea, maybe getting lost in the details, maybe not even trying to get to the idea itself. Either way, doesn’t hurt to be humble - I’ll definitely try to be.

More to come

That project had one more curious episode with the same person. I hope to write about it someday.