alt Hacker NewsFunny story about drag-and-drop:
At my very first job, we had a weekly meeting to assign tickets and estimates.
Our non-technical PM wrote "drag-and-drop" on a whiteboard, and then my name.
"Gavin, how long do you think this will take?"
"All week. At least. Maybe longer?"
PM laughed, then realized I wasn't making a joke.
"What do you mean 'all week'? That's ridiculous, do I need to give this to someone else?"
"Well, you could, but I wouldn't count on you getting it any sooner."
Appalled, he exclaims: "It's just drag-and-drop!"
After 10-15 minutes of a room full of engineers trying to explain the difficulty, he gave up with an unhappy "Fine."
The phrase "it's just drag-and-drop" became an inside joke for the rest of my time there...
Replies
I think non-tech people think that drag and drop is some sort of emergent property because you're pressing the mouse and holding it pressed.
I think the Dragology stuff actually gets to the nub of what makes interactive drag-and-drop challenging: it's speculative live editing of a view into your model data.
One of the more complex early modules that I wrote, was an engine for selecting a crop of an image in a scanner control plugin.
It was crazy complicated.
Simple is not simple.
Dumb question: why? It’s been a long time since I touched GUI code, but I thought it gave you a message with the URI to the file. How is this significantly different than file-open?
While it's a wrong assumption, I don't really think it's dumb for a non-technical person to assume this is fast to implement, and I don't think it's some epic own that he offered pushback on this even though he was wrong.
I love when non-technical people think they know better than the technical people about technical things...
everyone at my job knows to never utter the phrase "simple software change" when im within earshot.
good thing you had backup. rough hahaha.
Obligatory clip https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XpNdGvbwtf0
It’s funny that you write this, as when I was at Salesforce, I picked up a nested list drag-and-drop task solo except-testing (as the “go to” UI person on the team), and it took me almost the entire release cycle (1/3rd year release schedule (but picked it up later into it)) to complete it. While it turned out good (and I remember the feature’s implementation getting praise by a senior manager at a sub-org demo meeting), that I was called into a team meeting for a “Root Cause Analysis” (paraphrasing) to discuss why the feature took so long to implement.