Mort is the pragmatist, Einstein is the perfectionist, and Elvis is... let's be honest, Elvis is basically cancer to a project. I guess maybe a small dose of Elvis can help motivate?

I see the ideal as a combination of Mort and Einstein that want to keep it simple enough that it can be delivered (less abstraction, distilled requirements) while ensuring the code is sufficiently correct (not necessarily "elegant" mind you) that maintenance and support won't be a total nightmare.

IMO, seek out Morts and give them long term ownership of the project so they get a little Einstein-y when they realize they need to support that "pile of if statements".

As an aside, I'm finding coding agents to be a bit too much Mort at times (YOLO), when I'd prefer they were more Einstein. I'd rather be the Mort myself to keep it on track.

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KronisLV 10 days ago | parent | next [-]

> Elvis is basically cancer to a project. I guess maybe a small dose of Elvis can help motivate?

Sometimes teams are quite stuck in their ways because they don’t have the capacity or desire to explore anything new.

For example, an Elvis would probably introduce containers which would eliminate a class of dependency and runtime environment related issues, alongside allowing CI to become easier and simpler, even though previously using SCP and Jenkins and deploying things into Tomcat mostly worked. Suddenly even the front end components can be containers, as can be testing and development databases, everyone can easily have the correct version locally and so on.

An unchecked Elvis will eventually introduce Kubernetes in the small shop to possibly messy results, though.

	▲	rapind 9 days ago \| parent \| next [-]
		> An unchecked Elvis will eventually introduce Kubernetes in the small shop to possibly messy results, though. Elvis and Einstein joined powers to create 14 new javascript package managers over a handful of years while Mort tore his hair out.
	▲	hyperadvanced 8 days ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		Elvii often face a lot of criticism when Big New Ideas are overkill or they don’t work. They often get forgotten when the idea becomes standard issue and Mortified. The most pragmatic ideas today were Highly Risky and Unproved 10 years ago.

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dahart 10 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Your comment made me think Mort represents efficiency, Einstein represents quality, and Elvis represents risk. The ideal combination is difficult, and it changes over time. If anyone knew what the ideal combination was, companies would never fail. Risk can get something started, and lack of it can eventually kill software. In fact, I would argue the vast majority of software we’ve seen so far dies an eventual death due in part to its inability to take risk and change and adapt - it might be not enough Elvis in the long term. Too much risk can kill something before it takes off and can undermine the ability to ship and to ship quality. Generally speaking my gut instinct was to (perhaps like you) align with and defend Morts; the business objective is the only thing that matters and pays the bills, and there is certainly a class of Morts that doesn’t write spaghetti code, and cares about quality and tries new things, but prioritizes work toward the customer and not code wonkery. Anyway… this is too probably abstract to be very useful and I made it worse and more abstract, but it’s fun to hypothesize!

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kyralis 9 days ago | parent [-]

Mort might mean short-term efficiency, but those solutions are where technical debt and unmaintainable organically-grown complexity come from. That has its time and place, but it must be balanced to not doom anything but short-lived projects.

	▲	dahart 9 days ago \| parent [-]
		The only place I’ve seen technical debt and organic complexity come from in real life is from over-engineering (Einsteins over-engineer the code, and Elvises bring in too many dependencies) and, more importantly, from changing requirements (customers & PMs & management). The changing requirements is the bigger culprit most of the time, and that doesn’t reflect directly on programmers or programmer personalities. I’ve never seen efficiency arguments make the code unwieldy. If anything, the problem is that real life Morts sometimes under-engineer, and it takes some of the other types to build up a bit. I’ve seen over-engineering far more often than under-engineering. Anyway, Mort only means short-term efficiency if you make assumptions. It didn’t in the top comment, and it doesn’t have to, you can just as easily assume efficiency is long term and includes efficiency of maintainable code and efficiency of business processes. If you care about the business outcome, why would you jump to the conclusion that it’s short term thinking?

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chickenbuckcar 10 days ago | parent | prev [-]

Unfortunately for a fast growing industry (think AI, LLM), Mort + Elvis will be much more success then any combination with Einstein. The speed to adapt a new technology into a specific domain outweight your ability to scale for long term (think the oracle vs sybase in server)