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Comment by w8rbt

If managers come to developers with problems that are NP complete, no matter how well they transfer the idea/vision, or set time expectations, the problem cannot be solved efficiently. And, unless the developers have been trained in CS/Math they may not even understand that what they are being asked to do cannot be done.

For example, say a manager has an idea to find the largest group of friends in a massive social network. He wants a developer to write an app for that and has a 20K budget and 2 months. You could not write this app with 10 times that budget or time.

How can you determine which group of friends is the largest?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clique_problem

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_NP-complete_problems

parent w8rbt 7 years ago

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