I recently found myself faced with a decision where the best outcome may be to abandon prior work and start over more simply.
This was hard to come by because my brain wants me to reap the rewards of prior labor, even if less than ideal.
Do you have any stories where you or your team went too far down the sunk cost rabbit hole?
Latest comments (27)
Yes, Ben. I am experiencing it a lot lately since at work we stopped running wild and started working on product stability. I wrote a small article that speaks about one of those issues.
vikky.dev/on-sunk-cost-fallacy/
Like most comments - opposite situation for me.
If I get the tiniest whiff of something off in my architecture, File -> New -> Project... here we goooooooo!
And that's why I never finish my personal projects.
I once worked on some code that imported product definitions from central office to local factories. I was assigned to fix the bugs on this program since they needed to be fixed fast, otherwise product definitions could not be imported and the factory would not run.
I received bug reports once or twice a week but I quickly saw a pattern; the program was set up poorly. It had been created when there was one factory and two products, but at the time I worked on it there were 20+ factories and hundreds of products. The way the program had been expanded was by using copy/paste. Off course.
So I asked if I could rewrite it. Negative. It would take about a week to rewrite it and fixing the bug would take a few hours, so do the math. But I grew sick of fixing the same sh*t over and over again and started to rewrite it bit by bit. Management must have noticed that my fixes took significantly longer, but if they did, they didn't say anything. Over the coarse of a few months I had done the rewrite as a separate project in the hours of fixing the bugs and when I finally put it in place I really crossed my fingers. But it worked out fine; it came back only once or twice for some small things, but after that I never had to fix it again.
Unfortunately, management still think they made the right decision....
Wow. That's not an answer I was expecting to see, and is (if I may say so) far more brutal an approach than would have entered my mind.
Not saying that's bad, by the way.
Did that approach take special training?
But, in my experience, it is better not to do complete rewrites, it always takes at least 4 times longer than you hope. Refactoring and extending - yes. Rewrites are good in the first stages of a project when you do MVP and prototypes and figure things out.
Living it right now. Yay, Angular 1... 😅
🤢
A company I used to work for started using QlikView for all their data dashboarding and actively resisted pleas from my manager to even investigate different stacks. Cut to several years later, they have me writing a "big data" application in QlikView, which is a tool that holds all of its data in RAM and forces all active dashboards to share that RAM, and it Did Not Work.
So... Aside from the sharing issue, if the power goes out, data goes bye bye, right?
The data was usually pulled from somewhere else, and you couldn't add data on the fly, so that wasn't a problem so much.
But if one app went down, it took all the rest on that machine down with it.
...There was (pretty much) one machine.
Yes I have been burned by one.
The short version
A company developed an inhouse software solution which didn't work out. The typical pattern of quality vs. speed (»speed now, quality later«).
Lessons learned? None.
Coming up: The next inhouse solution. "The new hope" so to say.
Though being better than the first try, a new big mess was created.
Some time later I entered the company and was thrown into the shark tank.
The result:
Project being over a year late not to mention cost.
This was a literally death march.
Two people left the company before project ended.
Lessons learned? None.
This solution isn't thrown out of the window as it should have been.
More money, time and people are thrown at it. In some magical point in time everything will be unicorns - so the belief. A classical book example of sunken cost fallacy.
Good luck with that.
Repair Client: I have anti-virus software, but I got a bunch of viruses anyway.
Me: That's because the anti-virus software you're using has a reputation for missing most viruses. You need to use this other one (free), which is proven by independent lab tests to catch almost all malware.
Repair Client: I'd rather finish using the current anti-virus software. (About a year left on the subscription.) I paid a lot of money for it.
Me: Yes, but it doesn't work.
Repair Client: I don't care. I just want to get my money's worth.
There are so many people that are exactly like bad, I don’t understand it! It’s hilarious and frustrating at the same time.
Sounds more like the viruses are the ones getting his money's worth.
I love deleting code. The way I see it, the faster you can delete code and start over (whether it be a line or a project), what you're saving is the countless hours saved not continuing bad work.
I completely agree :-)
(added as a comment to a post called 'What little things make you happy while coding?')
Deleting code.
(The context here being: working with problematic legacy code and getting to the point where you have new code (paths) that do(es) the same thing but without the issues, so that the old code, and its issues, can just be discarded)
@ben : so I went to look up the syntax for a comment in the Editor guide, with my comment id readily for cut-and-paste. Turns out there was no need. Coincidence to the rescue! :)