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I am sorry but I will be cynical here. Does the author know how many shit people give about clarifying and planning things these days? Let alone documenting. ZE

I am sorry but I will be cynical here. Does the author know how many shit people give about clarifying and planning things these days? Let alone documenting. ZERO. I worked in many companies scaling from small to huge and in-between and generally the process is the exact opposite. Small minded managers and insecure engineers want to build things as fast as possible thinking this will be their big chance to leave a mark in history. So they implement some crap (not uncommon to even see different teams building the same thing at the same time!!!) with the speed of light. Then 6 months later they keep patching bugs every week! If you ever mention them to slow down or try to find a working example before building or at least organize the work let's say by starting to explore the problem domain they would just bully you into oblivion... Case in point: Facebook. 'Move Fast and Break Things' One thing I learned is that being successful in an IT engineering company in the 21st century is let the idiots do their idiotic ways and concentrate on my work and if they propose stupid things than let be it. Politics are always stronger then engineering considerations. Maybe Uber got it right from the beginning, I cannot confirm that claim. But I am very skeptical that any established organization would change in this direction proposed by the author.

wjossey 8y ago
As someone who runs a business with a co-founder, we both are constantly making trade offs. How do we move quickly while remaining stable? How do increase our featureset without getting over our skis? How do we grow our business quickly, but not take on the wrong customers? Incentives can win, and should win, on both sides of the equation at different moments in time. The most mature organizations can feel the pain from one direction or another, and adjust accordingly.
- anon49124 8y ago
  Shortcuts are great when survival time is bought. This can turn into a self-defeating problem when there is extreme habituation to recurrently and disproportionately sacrificing effort, cost and/or burdens on others in future for the now such that the shortcut wastes vastly more net time and money than it could've ever saved. I've seen founders shoot themselves in both feet and unable to move fast, or anywhere, because they knowingly stuck themselves with keeping 50 plates spinning while trying to swim through quicksand... especially solitary founders because they lack the check and balance of a second or third founder to keep them honest with reality and on-track.
anon49124 8y ago
Duplication of effort is common-place at scale because there are too many communication paths to even hope for very much collaboration, much less organize everyone/everything top-down (eg, impossible). Technical debt is like the national debt: interest gets paid along with way, but sooner or later there will be a reckoning. There is often too much ego-investment, NIH and sunk costs bias for people to diverge much from whichever direction they were moving, even if it's not a good direction to go. There is no perfect; and in fact, the perfect is the enemy of the shipping; and there's a infinitely massive continuum from fragile to awesome.

wjossey 8y ago

As someone who runs a business with a co-founder, we both are constantly making trade offs. How do we move quickly while remaining stable? How do increase our featureset without getting over our skis? How do we grow our business quickly, but not take on the wrong customers? Incentives can win, and should win, on both sides of the equation at different moments in time. The most mature organizations can feel the pain from one direction or another, and adjust accordingly.

anon49124 8y ago
Shortcuts are great when survival time is bought. This can turn into a self-defeating problem when there is extreme habituation to recurrently and disproportionately sacrificing effort, cost and/or burdens on others in future for the now such that the shortcut wastes vastly more net time and money than it could've ever saved. I've seen founders shoot themselves in both feet and unable to move fast, or anywhere, because they knowingly stuck themselves with keeping 50 plates spinning while trying to swim through quicksand... especially solitary founders because they lack the check and balance of a second or third founder to keep them honest with reality and on-track.

anon49124 8y ago

Duplication of effort is common-place at scale because there are too many communication paths to even hope for very much collaboration, much less organize everyone/everything top-down (eg, impossible). Technical debt is like the national debt: interest gets paid along with way, but sooner or later there will be a reckoning. There is often too much ego-investment, NIH and sunk costs bias for people to diverge much from whichever direction they were moving, even if it's not a good direction to go. There is no perfect; and in fact, the perfect is the enemy of the shipping; and there's a infinitely massive continuum from fragile to awesome.