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Most execs at most companies really are driven by very short-term planning and thinking, as it benefits their career to do so. They just need enough good quarte
by subharmonicon 3y ago
Most execs at most companies really are driven by very short-term planning and thinking, as it benefits their career to do so. They just need enough good quarters/years to justify their promotion from VP to SVP or SVP to CEO. Nobody gets blamed and punished three years after they move on to a new role for the shortsighted choices they made in their previous role.
Having said that, Cutler is not one of those execs, but was certainly subject to pressure from above to get systems out the door and keep the revenue stream coming in. As he mentions early in the interview, he’s really bothered by shipping bugs, really disappointed with the quality of software engineers in the industry, and really bothered by program/project managers treating every bug like a rare corner case. I concur with him on all three. Most of the bugs I file are “corner cases”, and yet I hit those issues every day and my bugs have multiple dups in the database and/or my bug gets duped back to an early report.
Having spent a few decades in this industry, all of it in Big Tech, I have yet to come across a company that doesn’t fold to the same sort of pressure, even if the engineers and first-level managers are pushing to get bugs fixed before shipping, and pushing for more frequent bug fix updates.
- esafak 3y agoSteve Jobs pushed individual contributors to perfect products before shipping them. Bill Gates had no taste to justify any sort of perfectionism, or compunction against shipping buggy products (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IW7Rqwwth84 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IW7Rqwwth84). It was all dollars and cents, as far as I can tell.
- subharmonicon 3y agoAs an Apple user since the launch of the original Mac, I guarantee there have never been any perfect Apple products. Every Mac OS until OS X crashed continuously on even moderate use. Thankfully Steve did manage to build better systems at NeXT and brought that technology back when Apple acquired NeXT and was able to substantially improve Apple’s Mac product as a result. It’s still far from “perfect products”, though, even during the time period that Steve was still alive and at Apple. To your point, I do agree that things have gone downhill quality-wise since his death, but I attribute this as much to being completely schedule driven as I do to the personalities involved in managing the projects.
- eviks 3y agoWhy would you believe this easily disproven (via brief use of Apple products) myth???
- esafak 3y agoI do use them. The hardware is impeccable. The software is admittedly more spotty. But even then, the OS is great. All in all, I can't think of a better platform or I'd use it.
- eviks 3y agoThe impeccable butterflies??? And the question wasn't about a better platform or the vague "greatness", but the myth of perfection, the one where serious bugs unfixed for years should be enough to dispel
- latency-guy2 3y agoShort term planning can mean anything to an observer though. For some, that's the next cycle, others thats the next 10 years. Microsoft employs a huge squadron of engineers, managers, and execs, all owning distinct products, tools, software, etc. They can have multiple people planning short and long term things, and they do. I doubt Microsoft will cease to exist within the next 10 years.
- Arainach 3y agoShipping is a feature. Nothing is ever done and nothing is ever bug free. Cutting the scope to have a complete product in finite time is the single most important part of product management.
- subharmonicon 3y agoAgree, with the caveat that I think finding the balance here is really the hard part, and projects that don’t pay down technical debt eventually fail, if only because people decide to replace them because of the debt.