Developer’s Boiling Frog Syndrome

Boiling Frog Syndrome is common metaphor used to highlight any tiny changes in a situation go unnoticed until they become overwhelming.

From the wikipedia, summarizing this in 3 lines -

The boiling frog is an apologue describing a frog being slowly boiled alive. The premise is that if a frog is put suddenly into boiling water, it will jump out, but if the frog is put in tepid water which is then brought to a boil slowly, it will not perceive the danger and will be cooked to death. The story is often used as a metaphor for the inability or unwillingness of people to react to or be aware of sinister threats that arise gradually rather than suddenly.

I can relate to many instances in our lives where we have to deal with legacy systems and keep our focus on designing futuristic architecture. In one of my recent design conversations, I was surprised to learn that many of us are so accustomed to Boiling Frog syndrome without even realizing.

The discussion was around 2 different systems that needs to be integrated based on future architecture reference, but one team was insisting to build a middleware layer to keep backward compatible components even though everyone agrees that it is going to be a throw away code in few months. But the argument was that it is safer to do so and lesser risk. It really felt like Boiling Frog syndrome in different levels where everyone gets comfortable with what they have and not challenging as far it “works”. It required someone who stayed out of the “vessel” to question these decisions to get the right approach in place.

As engineers, it is even more important to keep ourselves aware of the point when we need to jump out of the vessel and start exploring and questioning outside the vessel to find a better approaches.

It is common to deal with regular tactical issues every day and fail to recognize and respond to mounting issues or inefficiencies over time. This is not specific to any role but depends on how anyone become accustomed to suboptimal processes, outdated technologies, or inadequate tools, and fail to notice the accumulating problems until they reach a critical point.

How do you find your point to jump out of boiling vessel?

While this may be a tricky and depend on the situation, largely we can see a pattern.

• Solutioning Approach based on Assumptions— When discussions are focused only on assumptions and theories and not exploring any alternatives or tools. Assumptions are mostly guesses and might consider only certain aspect of the situation. Situations where preconceived notions are influenced or not seeking additional perspectives.
• Incremental Degradation — This is commonly known theory where you tend to ignore small issues and assume that it will be taken care someday. Over a period of time, you would have already invested so much enhancing those issues that it might turn out be bigger hurdle.
• Feel of Resistance — Any idea or solution has to be vetted with different aspects and should consider the best possible approach. But sometimes you start getting the feel of resistance yourself even to explore other ideas.
• Current Technology Trend — In current time, new technology, framework, tools emerge every day and it can quickly turn the older ones irrelevant. It’s a clear indication that you are already at the point if you do not have clarity on continuously evaluating your solutions against the current trend.

All said and done, it is not practical to be aware of everything that is happening in the world and how to keep yourself updated on everything. So, even though you might hear someone suggesting that you need to be updated with technologies or aware of new trends etc, many times it may not be relevant to problems that you are focused on. But it will greatly help understanding where the tipping point is and jump out of the vessel and explore for new ideas and technologies which can help build better solutions.