3 ms·

>> The funding bodies want us to detail all expenses and justify all the changes in the plan, because they don't want people to say that the public funds are mi

>> The funding bodies want us to detail all expenses and justify all the changes in the plan, because they don't want people to say that the public funds are mismanaged. This is just an example. We also write tons of useless papers, to justify that we are productive with this money. See how the solution is causing a different form of the problem it's trying to solve? I agree with your premise, but sometimes I think having multiple efforts in parallel and letting many fail might be more productive than going the safe route.

frank_nitti 4y ago
I could see that working for a set of moonshot efforts at startups who primarily only have to keep investors interested, or some subset of research projects at FAAMG companies with money to burn. But how could that work with big companies making contracts with other big companies as their customers? Doesn’t seem like they could afford to just “let many fail” as they could lose the customer’s trust.
- ratww 4y ago
  Big corps doing big projects are already doing risky stuff. Those big projects often fail to deliver the expected result within the expected time frame and budget. Devils advocate: Having multiple efforts in parallel with the crazy overhead would probably give at least one of them a fighting chance of succeeding. Who cares about the ones that failed when the whole big project worked for once.
  - frank_nitti 4y ago
    I see, we are referring to an internal mechanism for the vendor to try multiple routes to meet the customer ask - this makes more sense, but I could see a lot of traditional enterprise customers being hesitant to buy in if they were made aware (if you could do it with only the partial resources that delivered the “successful” solution, why am I paying for the others?)
    - phkahler 4y ago
      Most software is essentially rented. It already written and has zero marginal cost. The vendor is using the rent to develop the next version. An exception would be specific contracted work, or bug fixes under a maintenance contract. How that next version gets developed is really up to the company. Or we can just continue getting great stuff like windows 10 and 11.
woojoo666 4y ago
Well the original article talks about how the work that a software company does in a year, can be done in a few months by a freelance developer with zero bureaucratic overhead. But which freelance developer? For every freelance developer that succeeds, there will probably be ten or a hundred that fail, or push out a mediocre product. This is what all the meetings and design docs and testing is for. To increase the chance of success. I'm sure the same can be said for the academic world. If I was in academia and I was given funding without oversight, I would probably waste it all on researching things I found interesting but weren't necessarily useful to anybody. If you don't want to have to justify your expenses, then just fund it yourself.
HeyLaughingBoy 4y ago
> multiple efforts in parallel and letting many fail I actually worked for a company that did this for a while and the results were amazing. There were multiple tasks, each task being a way to improve or cost-reduce a part of the machine we built. Each task had 3 teams attempting to solve it a different way. We met back 6 months later to compare/contrast the outcomes. I've never seen so much innovation in such a short time. The job was a blast for those 6 months because you were only limited by budget (we had to build hardware) and imagination. And then, of course, since it was a multi-billion dollar company, the entire thing got shut down and we went back to business as usual. But at least I still remember it 10 years later :-)

frank_nitti 4y ago

I could see that working for a set of moonshot efforts at startups who primarily only have to keep investors interested, or some subset of research projects at FAAMG companies with money to burn. But how could that work with big companies making contracts with other big companies as their customers? Doesn’t seem like they could afford to just “let many fail” as they could lose the customer’s trust.

ratww 4y ago
Big corps doing big projects are already doing risky stuff. Those big projects often fail to deliver the expected result within the expected time frame and budget. Devils advocate: Having multiple efforts in parallel with the crazy overhead would probably give at least one of them a fighting chance of succeeding. Who cares about the ones that failed when the whole big project worked for once.
- frank_nitti 4y ago
  I see, we are referring to an internal mechanism for the vendor to try multiple routes to meet the customer ask - this makes more sense, but I could see a lot of traditional enterprise customers being hesitant to buy in if they were made aware (if you could do it with only the partial resources that delivered the “successful” solution, why am I paying for the others?)
  - phkahler 4y ago
    Most software is essentially rented. It already written and has zero marginal cost. The vendor is using the rent to develop the next version. An exception would be specific contracted work, or bug fixes under a maintenance contract. How that next version gets developed is really up to the company. Or we can just continue getting great stuff like windows 10 and 11.

woojoo666 4y ago

Well the original article talks about how the work that a software company does in a year, can be done in a few months by a freelance developer with zero bureaucratic overhead. But which freelance developer? For every freelance developer that succeeds, there will probably be ten or a hundred that fail, or push out a mediocre product. This is what all the meetings and design docs and testing is for. To increase the chance of success. I'm sure the same can be said for the academic world. If I was in academia and I was given funding without oversight, I would probably waste it all on researching things I found interesting but weren't necessarily useful to anybody. If you don't want to have to justify your expenses, then just fund it yourself.

HeyLaughingBoy 4y ago

> multiple efforts in parallel and letting many fail I actually worked for a company that did this for a while and the results were amazing. There were multiple tasks, each task being a way to improve or cost-reduce a part of the machine we built. Each task had 3 teams attempting to solve it a different way. We met back 6 months later to compare/contrast the outcomes. I've never seen so much innovation in such a short time. The job was a blast for those 6 months because you were only limited by budget (we had to build hardware) and imagination. And then, of course, since it was a multi-billion dollar company, the entire thing got shut down and we went back to business as usual. But at least I still remember it 10 years later :-)