Why Is It Really Hard
Some of the best Quora answers to“What is the hardest thing you do as a software engineer?”
- Explaining “yes, I can do it but no, it’s a dumb idea” in a politically and socially acceptable manner.
Andy Murdoch - Trying to find out what people actually want or need.
Lance Walton - Having to implement features that you don’t believe in.
Amir Memon - … Telling management that the requirements and schedule that they committed to a customer — without consulting the engineering team — cannot and will not be met …
Richard H. Schwartz - Dealing with stupidity, mediocrity and incompetence of others who keep interfering with your work.
Arvind Pai - Trying to implement a feature with just only one line of description.
Son Nguyen - “… Getting approval before and after doing any activity …”
“… Estimating time even before understanding what to do …”
Partheepan Paranjothi - Explain technical things to someone who doesn’t understand technology but still tries to pretend that they understand it and then give suggestions which don’t make any sense at all.
Devashish Datt Mamgain
The biggest problem we, software engineers and architects, have is not how to build things.
It is catastrophic shortage of people around who would be willing to and capable of clearly stating:
“We need to build X. You take care of making it live. I take care of making it successful”.
