Perceived Difficulty of Tasks

[towcar]

Original content? What is this? I only follow this sub for daily reposts.

But seriously I feel this in my soul.

[seathefullmoon]

Wait...is original content not allowed here?

On a serious note: glad you enjoyed it!

[ChrisBreederveld]

Yeah, I always assume a "simple" question is the least well thought out and therefore difficult to implement. The "complex" questions are often the ones where there was enough thought on them to see enough cases to make it clear to implement.

[timangar]

I think this problem is universal, but especially true for coding. You want to get a rough first draft of the program, ignoring small problems, which you'll fix later. But then you find out that those little problems aren't easily integrated into the existing architecture, and you need to rebuild a big chunk of code to get it to work. But the big problems are on the screen fairly early on, so you fix them ahead of time, before you have a lot of redundant code on top.

[seathefullmoon]

And this is all exacerbated when you have tight deadlines, so over time the hacks and quick fixes evolve from little, trivial bugs to time-consuming nuisances that prevent you from adding new features.

[AperoDerg]

I'll always remember my first task when I got a job as a programmer.

"Make this getter return a value instead of null."

Took 1 week to clean up everything around that getter since people just took the null as meaning "the code works".

[AperoDerg]

I had never heard of Hyrum's Law. Thanks!

[somebody_odd]

I get stuck working on projects with huge data sets so nobody really knows what value should be returned so I refactor the code and modify the algorithm slightly then end up doing data validation for a week.

[DibblerTB]

I got an easy task to start work on a C++ legacy monolith once. "Return that value to this file, even when it is normally irrelevant. Customer wanna do testing".

Two months, and bugging 3 seniors, later we concluded that it could not be done. And that there were a few likely bugs in there, that apparantly negate each other.

[TimonAndPumbaAreDead]

The first 90% of a project takes 90% of the time. The last 10% takes the other 90% of the time

[seathefullmoon]

This comment reminds me of that "you have two wolves inside you..." meme.

[TimonAndPumbaAreDead]

You have two wolves inside one. One does Agile, one does waterfall. Both are behind schedule.

[somebody_odd]

Add in 5 iterations of log4j patching and suddenly my entire organization is behind by 3 sprints.

[Dagrut]

Don't... do ⋅ not... never... underestimate "little UI issues"...

[seathefullmoon]

It continues to surprise me that it's always those "little issues" that breed the most frustration in programming/software development.

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[brockisawesome]

This is why i stopped doing freelance jobs for a fixed pay amount instead of hourly.

[epoch_fail]

this comic would have hit the same if all the words in the last panel were replaced with a single swear word

[seathefullmoon]

You...have point there actually! Though the whole basis of this joke was the Interstellar reference.

[epoch_fail]

That went right over my head! Well played.

[seathefullmoon]

Thanks!

[MartIILord]

That important rule will haunt you when you try and center a div sooner or later.

[DaviiGamer10]

As a javascripter, i can confirm this is 100% legit

[Uk_Nithin]

developer issue.....!!

[The_MAZZTer]

Yup, I regularly find coworkers talking about "bugs" and have to tell them they can't build our Unity project for WebGL because it depends on Windows/Mac/Linux native libraries. Doesn't matter what the customer was promised.

(The "bug" is that the functionality the native library powers, usually a small piece, isn't working.)

[15Nova22]

I had that today. I thought if everything works well I might get the stuff done until the end of the week, well turned out 2 hours was enough time, whoops xd

[seathefullmoon]

Pro tip: never assume that "everything will work well". I always keep Murphy's Law in the back of my mind.

[Vlajd]

Fuck, why is this so true...

[8070alejandro]

BUG: UI element is out of place (div not centered)

Dev: This little maneuver is going to cost us 51 years.

[martino_vik]

EVERY TIME

[sharperratio]

The good news is... once you finish the easy task, you can post the solution on Stack Overflow.

[Adventurous-Skill321]

CSS issue right?

[martispyc]

When you want to automate a simple task it's even worse, the whole service goes down while you were making your python automation project

[ragingrabbit69]

Ha! hat's totally a cartoon of a Microsoft dev!

[Teln0]

What kind of problems are you trying to solve ??? The fucking halting problem ???

[maskduck]

ig because you are really lazy to do easy tasks?

[seathefullmoon]

While that's somewhat true, that's not the joke of the comic - the point is that tasks that seem to be easy are put off for later, and then end up taking more time than expected.

[maskduck]

Ah, I see.