10 ms·
Please, someone tell the geniuses at Harvard business that no one ever used "Move Fast, break things" for chips. Having been in the industry long enough, I've s
by throwGuardian 7y ago
Please, someone tell the geniuses at Harvard business that no one ever used "Move Fast, break things" for chips. Having been in the industry long enough, I've seen plenty a launch date moved, and chip-respins executed in favor of risking a recall of hardware from the field.
It's only non-critical, consumer/casual software/applications that can afford to move fast, and break things. Your bank, or medical records, or even traffic light controls simply cannot move fast and break
- heavenlyblue 7y agoThey probably did though. Except the ones who survived didn’t? :)
- lowdose 7y agoLast October the U.S. Military replaced the eight 1970s floppy disks controlling all nuclear missiles. https://www.forbes.com/sites/zakdoffman/2019/10/19/us-military-to-replace-1970s-floppy-disks-controlling-nuclear-missiles/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/zakdoffman/2019/10/19/us-milita...
- paulie_a 7y agoThey had no need to upgrade. If anything they had a massive need to downsize the inventory of weapons. Plus the security protection was shockingly irresponsible. The code was all zeros
- kortilla 7y agoDownsizing is orthogonal to needing to upgrade. You still need to maintain whatever amount remains and that could call for software upgrades in light of a new issue.
- asveikau 7y agoFloppy disks physically degraded pretty easily. Seems like it could be a safety issue.
- adventured 7y agoThe code hasn't been all zeros for 40 to 50 years. It was all zeros on some of the arsenal for about 15 years from ~1962 until ~1977.
- paulie_a 7y agoThat was clearly a great 15 years of the cold war to have all zeros as a nuclear weapon code.
- jjeaff 7y agoI've heard that the unspoken truth of those launch sites is they are just being maintained for lack of orders to dismantle and that even in event of a nuclear war, they couldn't/wouldn't be used safely. The majority of the US's strategic nuclear arsenal would be fired from one of our nuclear equipped submarines.
- Frost1x 7y ago>Your bank, or medical records, or even traffic light controls simply cannot move fast and break Don't tell the banks and financial industry that (looking at you, Equifax).
- jevgeni 7y agoThe geniuses at HBR never claimed in the article that it applies to chips. The article says that increase in chip performance lead to a prevalent strategy in business (mainly tech) to be the first.
- ryguytilidie 7y agoIts crazy how tribalistic HN has become. The whole Boeing fiasco has produced SO MANY "gosh, all those MBAs are at fault. I assign 0 fault to the engineers!" and every. single. time. There is a problem relating to a management/engineering decision, blame from HN ALWAYS goes to "the MBA types" and very literally never to engineering. I guess I just don't understand what the point of this type of tribalism is? Feeling better about your team while lamenting how everyone else is stupid seems pretty unhealthy.
- Aperocky 7y agoWith high position came great responsibility. If the engineer instead of management were making those decision, we would blame correspondingly.
- ryguytilidie 7y agoAre you under the impression that management contains 0 engineers and that engineers had nothing to do with the decisions made...?
- TheOtherHobbes 7y agoI'm under the impression that MBA culture has issues with taking responsibility for failure, and will always try to assign blame somewhere - anywhere - else.
- jevgeni 7y agoThat’s just shitty leadership. Happens A LOT even without MBAs.
- mytailorisrich 7y ago"Move fast, break things" works well when iterating quickly and cheaply in an unknown space. Chip design is not one of those cases.
- bumby 7y agoTo the OP’s point, I think the claim is that this doesn’t work well if the unknown space is safety critical.
- mytailorisrich 7y agoYes, that would go under "cheaply" in my previous comment.
- bumby 7y agoSorry, I don’t follow. Are you saying it works well in safety critical software development? Cheaply in the case of adverse outcomes (whether cost, environmental impact, or impact on life) seems at odds with the very definition of software that has a high severity if it fails. I.e., to say safety critical software can be developed “cheaply” seems to ignore the costly consequences of that software failing
- mytailorisrich 7y agoIt does not work for safety critical software because it is obviously not cheap to break things...