Original post on Kodumaro.
Once I was running an operation, and my team had to build the application from scratch.
I had met the core developers, we had discussing a lot about which technology would better address our demand and, after many considerations, we had chosen Scala.
But (and there’s always a but) Scala programmers are expensive, and the company wanted to save every cent (as always).
So the company hired Java programmers (cheaper than Scala) and ordered us to train ’em.
So far, so good – but (another but) try to build from scratch a big and complex system, containing lots of interrelated nodes with countless interactions, and unpredictable corner cases – with a team that has no experience on the technology!
Well… the first problem we have gotten was the Either construct.
I usually use Either to transport an error using its left side, leaving the right side for the success result. It’s a common approach.
However it must be done with caution, one cannot simply put Either in every function return; and there’s no rule to set it, one needs some feeling, intuition, which is earned from the experience.
As expected, the base programmers took my code as written-on-rock rules, once they had no other reference to follow, and they saw me using Either in some functions, so they started to use the same approach… everywhere.
It put the project in real trouble: many errors were lost silently, other ones were raised a far cry from where it should’ve been caught – thanks to Scala, the stacktrace was carried along, but even so it used to be hard to debug.
The core team and I weren’t enough to review every PR with the required attention, worse ’cause it’s a very subtle and hard-to-catch issue.
After a while, I had to spend a long time cleaning the code: removing the Either from returns, and catching errors. It was necessary, but awful for the team morale.
The team wasn’t to blame, they were doing what was expected; but the company should’ve invested more in hiring qualified professionals and in qualifying the newbies.
Unfortunately the Capitalism is about profit, not quality, getting the employees to that kinda highly uncomfortable situation.
Top comments (2)
That's a shame. Long term benefit sometimes require short term expenses, and avoiding them might cost more after the errors occur. Errors that could have been avoided in the first place.
Exactly the point!! The search for the immediate profit mostly leads to losses in many contexts, including financial.