4 ms·
Idiots is a bad term for this. Novices need rules before they are competent. After a certain level of expertise you start breaking the rules, develop your own s
by dgb23 5y ago
Idiots is a bad term for this. Novices need rules before they are competent. After a certain level of expertise you start breaking the rules, develop your own specialized style, because you know when to break them and how to make up new ones. And we're all novices in some contexts, very rarely anything above that.
The problem is not rules/"idiots"/novices. The problem is when people who make/enforce the rules are not fit to do so, cling to the rules and apply them with sweeping generality. The people who create those problems are typically incompetent but eager or even zealous at the same time.
They are resistant to learning, addicted to power and/or afraid of change and certainly afraid of appearing incompetent. So they never get past that level where they start to recognize when rules need to change or need to get broken.
- surajrmal 5y agoIt's not just novices. Humans are just error prone and make mistakes. Processes to help prevent those mistakes from making material impact on the business are critical to making it sustainable. Honestly though, these processes, if done well can improve velocity of the organization. For example having a comprehensive set of precommit tests may enable your team to continuously ship from head every day. An alternative process to achieve the same effect may only allow shipping once every 3 months. This sort of thing applies to non-technical processes as well.
- qznc 5y agoIt’s not just errors. There is the effect of bounded rationality: The organization is too complex to consider everything, so intelligent people make decisions which have unintended bad effects.