I live in a wonderful country. That was sarcasm in case you didn’t get it. The problems are everywhere, literally: the government is corrupted to the bone, healthcare is overpriced and dysfunctional, labor is underpaid. Naming it all will probably take to much time. Just think about something (like education, privately held business or municipal sport facilities) — it is not working in this country; it is broken, it is bleeding money, it is everything but serving it’s purpose. It is a problem worth solving and an issue worth fixing.

But we will talk about that some other time.

As you have probably deduced the unemployment rate in the country is pretty high, especially among young people. In attempt to fix the situation government recently passed bill to make an unpaid intership a mandatory for all college students. What’s funny about the situation is that there are no jobs on the market. None. Zero. Null. The reason why fresh graduates are unemployed is not because they have no experiece but rather because there are no jobs for them. To pass the bill is easy, to create new jobs on the market is kinda hard. So why bother — stick to the easier solution.

Once I’ve visited a ruby conference. A guy there was talking about how he implemented a morphologic search in a product he was working on. It was some internal search engine which was performing searches within database of brand names. So if user typed cola-coca instead of coca-cola the system would try and predict the correct query and fix the input for user. He didn’t want to use LIKE queries because: “they are slow.” So instead of single LIKE query the system was splitting string with three different algorithms, looping through each chunk and querying database multiple time during process. Oh did I forgot to mention that there were about 70 brands in the system database?

You probably don’t have to travel far for more examples; look at your company or at your friends company. The heck, entire startup scene or almost any international company or government. Enterpreneurs are trying to solve everything except the single problem that matters. Instead of doing everything to deliver a viable product they are wasting time implementing different yahoo shims into the process of development. Microsoft is bleeding cash supporting sales of their crappy product instead of making a viable one. Developers are falling for whimsical bullshit such as cucumber instead of focusing on writing code that that will fold into the final product.

Although I have to agree that if you can’t solve given problem, trying to solve any other that is even at the slightest similar or related to the one you are stuck at will at least give you a feeling of not being utterly useless. But be honest with yourself — that feeling is completely delusional; by solving made up problems you are not really doing anything of any value.

So next time you have to do something, cut the crap and do your fucking job.