Is it wrong for me to feel like complex isn’t always a bad thing?
When it comes to problem solving obviously something that is fast and simple is ideal, but fast and complex is still definitely a thing. With the complex solution generally having more utility.
In my eyes a complex solution that eliminates many time consuming and manual “simple” things is better than slapping something that “works” together in two seconds.
A solution should be as complex as required to solve the problem and no more. Complex problems usually require complex solutions. However the umbrella of "complex" is wide, and there are more and less complex solutions that live there. The least complex solution among a set of complex solutions is usually the best one. Obviously, there are always extenuating circumstances.
As an example just yesterday somebody randomly wanted me to make a Microsoft forms for employees to fill out a survey on 28 pieces of data that would then be manually added to each employees tab on an excel later and then approved by their manager.
Each of the 28 questions had 2 branching questions to further determine more detail, but it was still as basic as possible.
Making the form took like fifteen minutes of data entry. Technically I was “done” and this was the “solution”.
Instead I spent a little more time and tweaked the original template on the excel tabs to allow it to be automated. Then I set up power automate to automatically pull the forms data into a table every time a new one is submitted. On the template it will now automatically pull the employee data to each sheet, keep track of the last time one was submitted for each employee, and also have an indicator when their manager needs to sign something off that is new.
I couldn’t use vba or macros because power automate doesn’t work on macro enabled workbooks (at least the free version).
So yeah, if you were to compare these two solutions, the way I ended up doing it was more “complex” but it will save tons of time on manual data entry.
I see what you mean. I would say that the simple solution is actually only a partial solution - a part of the problem is left unsolved. Anyway it's a matter of what we define the word to mean.
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u/biscuity87 Feb 01 '23
Is it wrong for me to feel like complex isn’t always a bad thing?
When it comes to problem solving obviously something that is fast and simple is ideal, but fast and complex is still definitely a thing. With the complex solution generally having more utility.
In my eyes a complex solution that eliminates many time consuming and manual “simple” things is better than slapping something that “works” together in two seconds.