Having gone from sole developer at a tiny company to a developer at Microsoft (and now back again), I'd like to propose a corollary to Hanlon's Razor: Never attribute to either malice or incompetence what can be explained by complexity that you don't know about.
In my view, it is a form of incompetence so common and, in practice essential for growth as a business that it has become a ubiquitous baseline against which we should strive to differentiate ourselves from.
It is complexity that is accepted in small amounts across dozens of projects over many years. Projects that add real value to the business while contributing to this invisible debt that from the business point of view, matters only once it has started directly affecting your revenue.
Eventually an organization can't scale without a major refactoring, rewrite, or an entirely new market vertical.
It's simply not economically viable to build software at the scale of windows without such issues. There are thousands of teams (not people) working on it and hundreds of thousands of people over the lifetime of the software. Even companies like Microsoft have pressure to deliver on time and be frugal, not just startups.
Incompetence is to spend too much time making software into a golden, egg laying donkey. As is building software that becomes impossible to change after a couple of years. Finding the fine line in between these extremes is what professional software engineering is all about.
Which is why there is a bussiness cycle, where every once in a while a startup will wipe the floor with a big inflexible competitor despite not having even a thousandth of the resources.
It takes me a couple of lines of code now to spin up a web server than can handle thousands of connections. Or an app with beautiful fluid UI.
But I remember that I am standing on the shoulders of giants. What seems like zero complexity to someone on the shoulder is actually not.
Sometimes the giants fuck up too. Ultimately it is incompetence. But not the kind that is attributable to laziness or stupidity. Engineers at Microsoft, I would assume are like engineers everywhere - no smarter, no dumber.
Just because I can build a Lego bridge perfectly, doesn’t make the guys who’ve built an imperfect actual bridge are incompetent. They’re just solving very different problems.
This is very true. So often I hear people arguing that something surely is simple to do and obviously people are idiots for not being able to, all while having no idea whatsoever about the system to which they are referring.
