4 ms·

F1 teams making ventilators is probably a pretty bad example. I bet these ventilators are very expensive, hard to maintain and have probably a lot of little pro

F1 teams making ventilators is probably a pretty bad example. I bet these ventilators are very expensive, hard to maintain and have probably a lot of little problems. I work in medical devices and if there is one thing I have learned it’s that there is a big difference between having something that works somehow and something that’s ready to be produced and maintained in the long run. I agree that big companies tend to stifle innovation but they are also very optimized and there is a lot of invisible work that has to go into achieving that state. I see the same in software. We sometimes have interns whip up some system that on the surface looks good and innovative and makes the old timers look bad and unimaginative. But once you try to deploy them they usually fall apart because they ignored some inconvenient real world details.

jimmySixDOF 7y ago
Your comment and the article's referance to honey bee behavior reminds me of a section that has always troubled me from an old Charlie Munger talk on human misjudgement [1] <QUOTE> ... 22. And then I’ve got development and organizational confusion from say-something syndrome. And here my favorite thing is the bee, a honeybee. And a honeybee goes out and finds the nectar and he comes back, he does a dance that communicates to the other bees where the nectar is, and they go out and get it. Well some scientist who is clever, like B.F. Skinner, decided to do an experiment. He put the nectar straight up. Way up. Well, in a natural setting, there is no nectar where they’re all straight up, and the poor honeybee doesn’t have a genetic program that is adequate to handle what he now has to communicate. And you’d think the honeybee would come back to the hive and slink into a corner, but he doesn’t. He comes into the hive and does this incoherent dance, and all my life I’ve been dealing with the human equivalent of that honeybee. [Laughter] And it’s a very important part of human organization so the noise and the reciprocation and so forth of all these people who have what I call say-something syndrome don’t really affect the decisions. <END QUOTE> So this "Say-Something-Syndrome" is a negative input that introduces development and organizational confusion in to an otherwise well tested method. It doesn't scale. It is to be ignored. This troubles me as an absolute position. Yes there is danger funneling good resources down a rabbit hole to nowhere and yur core strategies should not flap around like a faulty nic card chasing shiny new things. But, you cannot close a system off completely or it will get stuck. Contuious improvement, iteration, hot wash lessons learned, red teams, squad checks, all these are dependent on effective positive & negative feedback processing. Not writing off all dissenting opinion as noise. It's a balance. It's form of art. Dynamic systems are messy in real time both for managers and engineers and not much about that will change. Best we can do is learn what we can from some old bee and monkey [2] stories. [1] https://buffettmungerwisdom.wordpress.com/2013/01/14/full-text-of-speech-the-psychology-of-human-misjudgement-by-charlie-munger/ https://buffettmungerwisdom.wordpress.com/2013/01/14/full-te... [2] https://www.wisdompills.com/monkey-ladder/ https://www.wisdompills.com/monkey-ladder/
kristianc 7y ago
> I see the same in software. We sometimes have interns whip up some system that on the surface looks good and innovative and makes the old timers look bad and unimaginative. But once you try to deploy them they usually fall apart because they ignored some inconvenient real world details. You’ve criticized the article but ended up reaching essentially the same conclusion. Having interns spin up a new feature which can later be tidied up and put into production is a great use of time. Interns are cheap, less busy, see things that more jaded people may not, and are liable to be less risk averse too. If you take what the interns build and put it directly into production, that’s on you, but the interns may be able to get you 80% of the way there in half the time.
- Ididntdothis 7y ago
  "get you 80% of the way there in half the time." From my experience they don't. Either it gets thrown away or the cleanup requires as much or more even more work than if experienced people had done it from scratch. Edit: I am not saying there is no value in work from newcomers but I think it's often overrated. They usually do the easy part but finishing it takes much more work than people think.
  - guntars 7y ago
    Agreed, interns are extremely expensive and anyone who thinks that they are cheap labor is not aware of the day to day details. Only reason to ever have interns is if you want to give back to the community and grow your senior talent. You might end up with some loyal developers that know your stack, but I wouldn't bank on it. They certainly have no place in an early stage startup.

jimmySixDOF 7y ago

Your comment and the article's referance to honey bee behavior reminds me of a section that has always troubled me from an old Charlie Munger talk on human misjudgement [1] <QUOTE> ... 22. And then I’ve got development and organizational confusion from say-something syndrome. And here my favorite thing is the bee, a honeybee. And a honeybee goes out and finds the nectar and he comes back, he does a dance that communicates to the other bees where the nectar is, and they go out and get it. Well some scientist who is clever, like B.F. Skinner, decided to do an experiment. He put the nectar straight up. Way up. Well, in a natural setting, there is no nectar where they’re all straight up, and the poor honeybee doesn’t have a genetic program that is adequate to handle what he now has to communicate. And you’d think the honeybee would come back to the hive and slink into a corner, but he doesn’t. He comes into the hive and does this incoherent dance, and all my life I’ve been dealing with the human equivalent of that honeybee. [Laughter] And it’s a very important part of human organization so the noise and the reciprocation and so forth of all these people who have what I call say-something syndrome don’t really affect the decisions. <END QUOTE> So this "Say-Something-Syndrome" is a negative input that introduces development and organizational confusion in to an otherwise well tested method. It doesn't scale. It is to be ignored. This troubles me as an absolute position. Yes there is danger funneling good resources down a rabbit hole to nowhere and yur core strategies should not flap around like a faulty nic card chasing shiny new things. But, you cannot close a system off completely or it will get stuck. Contuious improvement, iteration, hot wash lessons learned, red teams, squad checks, all these are dependent on effective positive & negative feedback processing. Not writing off all dissenting opinion as noise. It's a balance. It's form of art. Dynamic systems are messy in real time both for managers and engineers and not much about that will change. Best we can do is learn what we can from some old bee and monkey [2] stories. [1] https://buffettmungerwisdom.wordpress.com/2013/01/14/full-text-of-speech-the-psychology-of-human-misjudgement-by-charlie-munger/ https://buffettmungerwisdom.wordpress.com/2013/01/14/full-te... [2] https://www.wisdompills.com/monkey-ladder/ https://www.wisdompills.com/monkey-ladder/

kristianc 7y ago

> I see the same in software. We sometimes have interns whip up some system that on the surface looks good and innovative and makes the old timers look bad and unimaginative. But once you try to deploy them they usually fall apart because they ignored some inconvenient real world details. You’ve criticized the article but ended up reaching essentially the same conclusion. Having interns spin up a new feature which can later be tidied up and put into production is a great use of time. Interns are cheap, less busy, see things that more jaded people may not, and are liable to be less risk averse too. If you take what the interns build and put it directly into production, that’s on you, but the interns may be able to get you 80% of the way there in half the time.

Ididntdothis 7y ago
"get you 80% of the way there in half the time." From my experience they don't. Either it gets thrown away or the cleanup requires as much or more even more work than if experienced people had done it from scratch. Edit: I am not saying there is no value in work from newcomers but I think it's often overrated. They usually do the easy part but finishing it takes much more work than people think.
- guntars 7y ago
  Agreed, interns are extremely expensive and anyone who thinks that they are cheap labor is not aware of the day to day details. Only reason to ever have interns is if you want to give back to the community and grow your senior talent. You might end up with some loyal developers that know your stack, but I wouldn't bank on it. They certainly have no place in an early stage startup.