Problem Solving

"Mainframe guys?! What do they know? They’re dinosaurs, the industry passed them by years ago...” was my response twenty years ago, when I first got out of school.

Someone had recommended that I take a look at how the mainframe guys (and gals) had solved a particular problem way back, while I was still just finding my identify in high school. But I dismissed it far too easily. Things, I felt, were changing too far, too fast.

In hindsight, of course, it took me a long long time to understand how wrong I really was. There were indeed things that I could learn from all of that earlier intellectual work. Problems that were solved, done and dusted. And what I truly failed to grok was that the work was done when there were less expectations, and more of an ability to focus longer and deeper on getting better solutions.

“Don’t reinvent the wheel” isn’t about using libraries or other existing code. It’s about not re-solving problems that in many cases were solved decades ago. And even deeper, it’s about not just quickly solving them in a brute force manner if there is already an elegant solution that has been deeply thought about and made available.

Still, being young, I wanted to solve problems right away and I guess that orients one to search for low hanging fruit. But inevitably, as there has been a tremendous amount of water under the bridge already, pretty much all of the low hanging fruit has been tasted by others. Many others.

The trick then is to spend some time first, to see if the problem is really new and unique. If it is, great -- you can learn from what people already know, but if it’s not then avoid falling into the trap; try to utilize what was done before. Under time pressure that can seem time-consuming and dangerous, but reinventing really common wheels is a guaranteed time sink that will only make the time pressures worse. After all, it is hubris to think that one can do a better job in a week of two of hacking, then was done decades before with thorough analysis and experimentation. Most solutions for low hanging problems out there are far better than anything we can dream up in a rush. The time spent learning them is time saved from falling prey to well-known issues.

But alas, I think it took me about 15 years to figure that out ...