alt Hacker NewsI think your comment is just as "insane" as the practice you are railing against. Although I wouldn't use the word "insane" - it's hyperbole. What's the right word here? I'm not sure... "dogmatic" isn't quite right.
If you are a two man startup, burning through runway and pre-product-market fit... then spending a lot of time on tests is questionable (although the cost-benefit now with AI is changing very fast).
What I find "insane", "dogmatic"... about your comment is the complete elision of this process of cost-benefit analysis, as if there should never be such an analysis.
I've worked with a lot of people like you. When a discussion begins about a choice to be made, they just stampede in with "THIS IS THE RIGHT WAY". And the discussion can't even be had.
This sort of "dogmatism" is so rife if engineering culture, I wonder if this is why the c-suite is so ready to dump us all for AI centaurs that just fucking ship features. How many of them got burned listening to engineers who refused to perform even the most basic of cost benefit analyses with the perspective of the business as a whole in mind and forced the most unnecessary, over-engineered bullshit.
I worked at one startup where the tech lead browbeat the founders into building this enormous microservice monster that took them years. They had ONE dev team, ONE customer, and the only feature actually being used was just a single form (which was built so badly it took seconds to type a single character in a field cause the React re-renders were crazy).
Now THAT's insanity.
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The truth is in the middle somewhere, regarding tests at least (yes, your microservices story is insane).
I think the author could have been happier with the no-test decision if they had treated the initial work as a prototype with the idea of throwing it away.
At the same time, writing some tests, should not be seen as a waste of time since if you're even at all experienced with it, it's going to be faster than constantly reloading your browser or pressing up-up-up-up-up in a REPL to check progress (if you're doing the latter you are essentially doing a form of sorta reverse TDD).
So I dunno... I may be more in line with the idea that's a bit insane to prevent people from writing tests BUT so many people are so bad at writing tests that ya, for a go-gettem start up it could be the right call.
I certainly agree with your whole cost-benefit analysis paragraph.
Did I say that my way was the right way? No: what I said was actively disallowing tests in every situation was the wrong way.
There is no ability here for the cost benefit analysis to change over time. There is only no tests
> After we started hiring, it became a disaster.
When it stopped being two people he still forbade tests. In this decade. That is fucking nuts.
Fun fact: the guy I worked a 2 man project with and I had a rock solid build cycle, and when we got cancelled to put more wood behind fewer arrows, he and I built the entire CI pipeline. On cruisecontrol. And if you don’t know what that is, that is Stone Age CI. Literal sticks and rocks. Was I ahead of a very big curve? You bet your sweet bippy. But that was more than twenty years ago.
Not having ANY tests means tons of manual testing is needed every time you modify code, which will rapidly consume more time than writing the tests would.
> they just stampede in with "THIS IS THE RIGHT WAY". And the discussion can't even be had.
That's exactly what this person is railing against. They strictly forbid testing.