3 ms·
The writer discusses the prevalence of "gut feeling" in development, and how justifications are often retro-fitted to justify preferences which might be driven
by startupdiscuss 10y ago
The writer discusses the prevalence of "gut feeling" in development, and how justifications are often retro-fitted to justify preferences which might be driven by familiarity, or novelty.
Let me say this in defense of gut feelings:
Sometimes the opposite of gut feeling is process. Bezos recently talked about the potential pitfalls of process, and Jobs famously warned us against confusing process with what he calls "content."
The issue is that if you have a process, you end up relying on it to make things good. It cannot. If someone were to walk into the process and say "This is just wrong. Come on, do it this way," you could (rightly) accuse them of relying on gut feeling.
All of this is to say that there are gut feelings and then there are gut feelings, and it is important to tell them apart.
- rocqua 10y agoIt felt to me like the argument was that gut-feeling stuff can impede collaboration. I'd argue that, in large collaborative settings, this is precisely where process is needed. This contrasts against safety process, where you add process to defend against mistakes as opposed to enabling collaboration.
- noobiemcfoob 10y agoYou have a point. A company's "process" to me has always represented the message passing system in a multicore processor. The process is the method by which each core is updated with pertinent information (consumables or just new rules for their task). Bad process looks like a lot of overhead where everyone spends more time "communicating" than working. Ultimately, as long as you can quickly and effectively communicate the impact of a gut feeling, there is no problem, but they would seem especially hard to translate into a more formalized process for communicating thought out decisions.