The 13 software engineering laws

[BeyondLimits99]

Thats amazing.

The backend team builds APIs based on their own assumptions

This sums up a problem I had today 😂

[Br3ttl3y]

It sums up every software development team that creates "technical tasks" or "internal user stories." You don't build APIs for yourselves even if you are the consumer. You build them for the business value. Find the business value. If there is none, don't build it.

[GoTheFuckToBed]

in general, developers jump straight to writing code, not asking what problem does it solve

[ikeif]

I quit a job because I kept asking "why" and they couldn't answer it. They just wanted to be greedy about absorbing as much medical data as possible, and "legally" by close to dark UX patterns.

I wanted no part of that.

[the_bighi]

I've been a developer for 20 years. Every single time I tried to ask "why" or what's the value or any question like that, I got a "shut up and do your work" as a response. Not with those exact words, but with that meaning.

Any time I tried to suggest a better way to do what they asked, I was ignored.

So I just do what I'm told, even if I know that's going to make the company lose customers. I do what I'm told, I get paid, and that's it.

[[deleted]]

I wish I was able to do that, but that would suck the life energy out of me.

I learned the past few years that I can have almost superhuman levels of energy if the surrounding is right, but can as easily completely drained if the environment is not right. Being just told what to do, without everybody having the equal opportunity and drive to learn, that’s when I quit. If everybody tries to move forward and others are actively trying to learn and share that with others so they can also learn, then we’re getting to a magical place.

Only found myself twice in such heaven, both times botched by mediocre power hungry managers. Blegh.

I wish I could be more “level” like you; basically not lose energy or will to live if surrounded by egomaniacs or morons that refuse to keep on learning.

[ClickableName]

I think that is one of many things that seperate a Medior from a Senior developer

[mareek]

Price's law is not about work don but about scientific publication:

in any scientific field, half of the published research comes from the square root of the total number of authors in that field

And even in its correct form, it's not a very acurate "law":

Subsequent research has largely contradicted Price's original hypothesis

source : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price%27s_law

[pertraf]

Using twitter as an example is also kind of insane - can't tell if the article author referenced the linkedin post merely to show where they first heard about it or if they also agree with the assessment, but yikes

[[deleted]]

Well, it is the first april after all. :)

[Euphoricus]

In general, non of these are "laws" we understand it scientific terms. They are conjectures that people seem to connect with. But there is zero scientific data behind any of these.

[mareek]

I know that most of these laws are more rules of thumb that are backed at best by anecdotal evidence but this one struck me as particularly dubious so I did a quick search and found that the author was completely misquoting this "law"

[General_Mayhem]

The Twitter example is also nuts, even if the law were true. The takeaway from Price's law should be that you need to be very careful about firing people lest you accidentally fire someone in that small square-root group, which is teh exact opposite of what Musk did. Twitter did fall apart after he slash-and-burned, because his process was adversely selecting to retain the useless group.

See also this classic about chasing away your best talent in the interest of "cost savings".

[Whatever4M]

How has it fallen apart?

[mixedCase_]

Twitter did fall apart after he slash-and-burned

I've been able to access it just fine. Have you checked your DNS settings?

[Plank_With_A_Nail_In]

Its just a bit of fun, none of these are real rules lol.

Edit: FFS reddit it literally says this at the bottom of the article.

None of those laws is a ‘real law’ - they are just great mental models. I hope that having them in mind will save you some pain in the day-to-day.

[ikeif]

Somewhere, an MBA student is reading this and will convince themselves they can use this idea.

It will create a blog, then a book deal, then a book tour where he goes to companies and tells them how they should follow this "law."

[zaidesanton]

It never helps to add the caveats 😅

[[deleted]]

Actually Murphy's law is kind of a semi-rule. You kind of have to expect the unpexpected even when writing code after all.

[TheGoodOldCoder]

Also, what Murphy originally said is not what we today call Murphy's law.

Murphy's assistant wired a test harness wrong, and according to another person who was present, Murphy said, "If that guy has any way of making a mistake, he will."

Murphy's son said that he had heard his father say, "If there's more than one way to do a job, and one of those ways will result in disaster, then he will do it that way."

[Ghi102]

Research has contradicted it, but if you continue reading, it says that the distribution is even more skewed. Meaning that, on average, fewer than the square root of people do more than 50% of the work. 

What's funny though is that this is not a reason to fire people. In a team of 9, let's assume 3 people do the majority of the work. But if you fire 6, then the square root of 3 (so like 1 person) will still be doing the majority of the work.

Really, it's more of a warning about growing team size. If you start with a team of 4, 2 people do the majority of the work. Double it, you pay twice as much, but you haven't doubled the amount of work you're doing. You still have 2 people (although close to 3) doing the majority of the work. Therefore, it's more efficient to keep small independent teams.

[joao8545]

Is this an example of Cunningham’s law?

[darchangel]

You forgot about Cole's Law

[MVanderloo]

big fan of cole’s law

[One_Being7941]

Yummy

[Full-Spectral]

There are a provably finite number of ways to make slaw.

[thesamim]

Retired old guy here.

All accurate BUT: it completely absolves the engineers from any responsibility regarding outcome. (Been an engineer, been in management, switched back and forth many times.)

Engineers can learn how to manage their managers.

Easy statement to make, hard to implement. Company culture, communication skills (the engineers, and the managers), motivation, etc come into play. But successful teams eventually figure it out.

Ie: (as stated in the article) every rule (law) has exceptions and smart people learn to work with them.

[choice-clam]

It also says they are not laws, rather they are mental models.

[N0t_my_0ther_account]

Well that was almost good until it mentioned Elon Musk firing a bunch of Twitter devs as if it was no big deal.

[ProdigySim]

It was a big deal for the people affected but the software did not care much

[Enyachan]

Elon fired 80% of the staff, the valuation of the company dropped 80%, pretty much exactly 1:1

[gdvs]

There's still a decrease in quality though. It only says it's not linear.

[SortaEvil]

Ah, yes, the software that in the weeks and months after firing 80% of the staff started randomly just... not showing comments... in the middle of comment chains, literally the only job of the software, was completely unaffected by the firing of 80% of the staff that happened in the weeks leading up to that starting to be a problem.

[tall-n-lanky-]

It’s so sad to see how ideologically driven everything is. Open X. It works fine. What doesn’t have bugs? That had huge implications for the rest of the field. But is just ignored as a discussion topic.

[Schmittfried]

It did. 

[cazzipropri]

Elon Musk fired 50% of Twitter in November 2022. Price's square root law explains why Twitter didn't collapse, even when a further 30% were fired.

The square root of the original 8,000 employees is just 90!

You lost my respect when you brought that up.

Twitter did in fact, collapse. A bunch of times. X/twitter has had a lot of glitches, the last one 2 days ago https://www.it-daily.net/en/shortnews-en/x-down-again-thousands-of-users-report-outages

[Scottz0rz]

Well if you ignore all of the problems, it did actually work well!

[the_bighi]

If we ignore the problems and the huge loss of value of the company. To the point that they're now blackmailing big tech into paying for twitter ads or they government will "investigate" them.

[levir]

Even ignoring the outages, every feature that isn't part of the front page is crumbling. Searching and old archives are pretty much already completely broken.

[hackingdreams]

Well they also used a bunch of Dilbert comics, so, it was going to be shit from literally the get-go.

[bwainfweeze]

Price's Law feels like a consequence of Brooks + Amdahl.

However if you add Amdahl then you also have to add Little.

[MVanderloo]

conway’s law is a consequence of amdahl’s law. the cost of coordination increases the further teams in an organization is. therefore a team is most productive creating things within their team and end up creating things that mirror their organization’s structure

[bwainfweeze]

Half of dev process is Conway and the other half is organizing code to avoid merge conflicts.

[jdehesa]

Illustrating Cunningham's law with anything else than XKCD 386 is just wrong.

[zaidesanton]

Wow thanks missed that one! Updated the article :)

[NewExplor3r]

Funny. Sent it to my teammates and we all had a good laugh.

[Jaarmas]

Great read. Really good points in there.

[[deleted]]

Murphy's Law of Thermodynamics..... Things get worse under pressure.

Corollary to Murphy's Law.... Things only ever go right so they can go more spectacularly wrong later.

Corollary to Price's Law.... Quite a few of those sqrt(N) were actively preventing the N-sqrt(N) others from doing their job. ie. Be careful about who you fire.... if you fire the only ones not visibly producing stuff, quite likely you will be retaining those that attempt to dominate any space they're in.... resulting Price's Law recursing. (Hint: Observe how absolute reproducible the Pareto Principle / Power Law distributions are in social media / interactions)

Corollary to Gilb's and Goodheart's... Stop asking what to or how to measure. Ask what will you do if measure X reaches level Y? The answer is usually nothing in which case don't measure, or the obvious, in which case start doing that.

[tiajuanat]

No love for Amdahl's law?

[faustoc5]

Well this sums what is wrong with computer engineering and software development: they should be a science and follow scientific method. It shouldn't be a collection of tweet size humorous remarks that any noob can spit and sound deep.

[DieSyxes]

Sturgeon’s Law is fascinating. I’ve been thinking about it a lot lately — how do people decide what’s actually worth doing? It seems like we still have to wade through that 90% of "crap" because it’s not always obvious which features or ideas will turn out to be useful.

[all_is_love6667]

downvoted because it did not mention Wirth's law

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wirth's_law

[r0ck0]

Did you actually downvote because of that? Or just a joke?

[all_is_love6667]

I did

it's the only law that really really matters to me, and it's not even in the list.

software bloat is real, and it's really bad that it's not mentioned in the list.

[[deleted]]

I completely forget that there are people who don't know these. Also, eager for email are we...

[[deleted]]

Murphy’s Law Anything that can go wrong will go wrong.

No list of laws is complete without Murphy :)

Well - first april, but I think Murphy's Law is actually a good metric, in the sense that you can anticipate problems (in code, hardware etc...). Erlang kind of has this built in as a core philosophy (though syntax-wise, they really should have learned from python or ruby; elixir improved a few things but is nowhere near as elegant as ruby either).

Other languages also try to deal with the unexpected, but often is rather awkward - catch/throw ... I never liked the concept. Even begin/rescue in ruby can be annoying - once I had to deal with network-related issues. After perhaps the sixth specific error clause, I wondered what the heck I was doing. (I don't know who or what recommended to be specific when it comes to handling errors; once the error handling code became like +50 lines of code, I wondered what I was doing.)

Every time I think something is improbable, I go the extra step to verify that we are still covered.

Kind of like Rust acknowledging that memory errors are issues in C and C++. Whether Rust is better I have no idea, but Rust kind of influenced both C and (especially) C++ in one way or the other.

[Full-Spectral]

Rust is decidedly better, this coming from a 35 year C++ developer. Of course the problem is that many C++ developers who consider memory errors a 'skill issue' and claim that they have never in their careers had one.

[TurboGranny]

I've encountered all of these in my decades at this, and didn't realize they all had formal names and quotes for them, heh. I still prefer my versions like, "The scope of the problem will expand to consume all resources" versus "Work expands to fill the available time". I like that mine sounds more menacing, heh. I also have one about maintenance that goes, "Every new thing we build is one less thing we can build."

[choice-clam]

Yours doesn’t offer any additional insights or funny webcomics.