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Discussion on: What is a type of "overconfidence" you have observed in developers?

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Kasey Speakman • Edited

I have seen developers assume the way they solved a particular problem is unconditionally the best way. (And I have been this dev at times.) I think that usually these devs are well-meaning. But they are discounting the possibility that the other team's constraints might be radically different. Which can make their solution impractical for another team. For example, suggesting that another person should solve their problem with microservices because that worked really well for you. But the other person is at a small company whereas you are in a large organization with multiple teams.

The particular variation of this problem that I dislike the most is in people who write articles and present at conferences for a living. I have observed sometimes the code they write doesn't have a life outside of the demo. It doesn't face the ongoing challenges that come with external users requesting unforeseen things. But for the sheer fact that it demos well, a conference attendee or internet reader will put some of these strategies in their code bases. And they have to learn the hard lessons of why it doesn't work under real-life usage. You can pretty much assume that vendors demoing their products are doing this on purpose. But I've seen it a bit in trade publications and tech blogs too.