3 ms·
What makes companies fast is, essentially, not hiring the industry people. An interesting, and a fairly broad observation. Can you elaborate?
by lisasays 4y ago
What makes companies fast is, essentially, not hiring the industry people.
An interesting, and a fairly broad observation. Can you elaborate?
- jvanderbot 4y agoI think they elaborated in the remainder of their comment. The point seems to be that following patterns and programming for future use necessarily slows you down because it detracts from just making the damn thing work right now. And at an early startup, making the damn thing work is all that really matters. (I'm at a laterish startup and we do attempt to follow some process and patterns where it would structure things enough to enable cleaner onboarding as we grow).
- cutler 4y agoFacebook is the classic example of this. Hackish procedural PHP that REALLY worked.
- DeathArrow 4y agoAlso Twitter. They started with Ruby on Rails and rewrote in Java at a later time.
- lisasays 4y agoMeaning that if we cargo-cult the alleged (and probably overhyped) development rationale of Twitter-like startups, we are implicitly banking on their "It's a rocket ship to the moon or nothing, baby!" growth plans as well. No viable position for most companies (or even most startups) to take.
- cutler 4y agoThey went all-in on Scala first after Ruby. I think the Java is more recent.
- lisasays 4y agoAnd at an early startup, making the damn thing work is all that really matters. Not if it comes at the cost of making your co-workers hate you for the messes you continually leave behind. And to lose faith in upper management for holding you up to be a "rockstar" for doing so. And for them to start looking for new jobs, as a result. The optimal level for basic hygiene and defense programming in a startup is -- perhaps a notch or two lower than in a staid, manager-driven post-startup company. But certainly not zero.
- wruza 4y agoHow would you define “a mess”, and also why “dumb straightforward code” is a mess, if you think so?
- lisasays 4y agoHow would you define “a mess”, "The nose knows", as they say. I love dumb, straightforward code BTW. It's my guiding aesthetic much of the time in fact. But that wasn't what I was referring to, here. Rather the "too smart for its own good... and utterly brain-fucked" end product which is the calling card of your average rockstar / ninja developer.