4 ms·

"Fail fast" is no excuse for being a moron, flake or scumbag

57 points by michaelochurch 15y ago

michaelochurch 15y ago
No idea if I'm taking the most effective approach here, but these ethical discussions are long overdue and I really hope they'll occur.
- GoodIntentions 15y ago
  I think the folks that would benefit most from an improvement in ethics are likely to read this without taking away anything more constructive than new ways to 'position' themselves to folks who aren't sociopaths. still worth talking about tho. ( and yeah, a bit long for a blog post, but only minutes to read.. some things take more than 140 characters )
  - michaelochurch 15y ago
    I'm not writing this for the unethical people. I'm writing it for the marginally good people who are lazing about while the world burns. I'm a believer in a 10/89/1 model of human morality. (These numbers are approximate.) The Good are 10%. The Bad are 1%. The Weak are 89%. The Good outnumber the Bad and one might expect them to win, but the Bad just as often win because they are willing to go further in their manipulation of the Weak.
    - GoodIntentions 15y ago
      Fundamentally I think we agree. Shepherds, sheep and wolves. If you think you're dealing with a wolf at your level in the company, look up. Ultimately, what the executive allows, it endorses. Odds are they see a man cut from the same cloth, admire his drive, his self interest and and his hard-headedness. If he's still there in a year, I'd say he represents the company's core values.
- hluska 15y ago
  If you strip out some personal bitterness and spent some serious time with a scorched earth editor, this could be a very effective treatise on the state of ethics and corporate responsibility in the technology industry. You touch on some interesting concepts that deserve thought... Alas, phrases like "snot-nosed kids", "Google's douche-tsunami" and "little sociopath" betray both personal bias and anger. Phrases like these make it too easy to dismiss this article as little more than a rant. I believe that if you're going to call out an industry on ethics, you have to pursue the article as a journalist would. Keep your personal feelings under wraps, tell the whole story and leave the conclusions to your readers. When it comes to proving a point and convincing people to change, passionate journalism always trumps passion on its own.
  - michaelochurch 15y ago
    I think I'm going to tighten it up later today. As for phrases like "little sociopath", I want to call people to action on this sort of thing. I want people I've never met to call out and halt their own little sociopaths. I call out Google because it was once a great company, and billions of dollars of value within in it has been destroyed by careerist middle managers who had no right to do so. I feel like Google is symbolic, because it was such a great company for so long. How on earth did a company go from being a cultural leader (in workplace progressivism) to using Jack Welch-style rank-and-yank in a couple of years? Journalistic neutrality, on this sort of issue, either veers toward meaningless abstraction ("one model is...") or conservative fact-based concretion. I want to present the facts, but I also want to present, accurately, the more intangible (but no less real) ether of injustice between them.
    - rhizome 15y ago
      As for phrases like "little sociopath", I want to call people to action on this sort of thing. I want people I've never met to call out and halt their own little sociopaths. Don't try to be manipulative, just lay out your case; neutrality doesn't have to be the goal, but readability would be a plus. One easy place to start is by removing all sentences that include the pronoun "I".
    - 15y ago
Silhouette 15y ago
I'm sorry, I really did try to read this because it sounded like it might interesting, but it's well over 2.5K words and by about halfway through I still had no idea what it was really about. I skipped down to the final paragraph and that still didn't seem to tell me. May I respectfully suggest that future posts this long have a one-line or at least one-paragraph summary at the top?
- andywood 15y ago
  I think it's more than the lack of a summary. The whole essay could really benefit from a lot more editing and tightening up.
  - michaelochurch 15y ago
    I agree. I'm outraged and disgusted by things I've seen over the past 12 months-- some have happened to me, most to other people-- and it's really affecting the quality of my writing.
    - rhizome 15y ago
      A classic technique is to allow someone else to read the essay before publishing it.
      - michaelochurch 15y ago
        I agree with you. Usually I put 1-2 months before writing a blog post/essay and posting it. I just see this matter as a bit more urgent, as I really want to see the American Spring (the 2012 campaign of people calling out unethical behaviors at companies, rather than protecting scummy ex-employers) happen. Words-of-prose can be like lines-of-code: beyond about 500, it takes a long process of review not to have some degree of mess.
    - DavidAdams 15y ago
      I wouldn't be so hard on this essay. It's a little scattered, but there's some gold in there. Writing a concise, powerful essay is really, really hard, which is one of the reasons that people who are really good at it become famous (Jonathan Swift, Christopher Hitchens, etc).
paulsutter 15y ago
I really like the motivating idea behind this post, and read all the way through for that reason. It has some good points (the 30/60/90 PIP example), but it's hard to remember the key points. As a fan of the idea, I hope you can spend a little more time to tighten it up and add some more concrete examples (some of the points seemed a little hard for me to picture concretely).
- michaelochurch 15y ago
  I guess the key point is: a lot of people are using "fail fast" as an excuse for behaviors that previous generations would consider frankly irresponsible, if not unethical, and I think the general element of scumbaggery that we've seen in technology of late is a result of this absurd ideology.
  - furyofantares 15y ago
    What behaviors, exactly? Do you have examples? My apologies if this info is in the second half of the post, I started skimming about halfway through.
    - michaelochurch 15y ago
      No need to apologize. Post was long. Actually, the best list of examples is in another post: http://michaelochurch.wordpress.com/2012/04/07/an-ethical-crisis-in-technology/ http://michaelochurch.wordpress.com/2012/04/07/an-ethical-cr... Snippet: Here’s some shit I’ve either seen, or been credibly informed of, in the past 24 months, most of which was never in the news: no-poach agreements, attempted blacklisting of whistleblowers, a rescinded job offer based on a rumor that suggested PTSD, abuse of process within large companies, extortion of ex-employees, gross breaches of contract, frivolous lawsuits, threats of frivolous lawsuits, price fixing among venture capitalists, bait-and-switch hiring tactics, retaliatory termination, and fraudulent, no-product startups designed to embezzle angel investors.
  - jpdoctor 15y ago
    > * that previous generations would consider frankly irresponsible, if not unethical* Both in this article and the "ethical crisis" link therein (http://michaelochurch.wordpress.com/2012/04/07/an-ethical-crisis-in-technology/ http://michaelochurch.wordpress.com/2012/04/07/an-ethical-cr...) makes me think you are young and new to the game. Very unethical and irresponsible behavior has been around a long time. Internet Bubble v1.0 had a world of crap going on, with much bigger dollar-numbers for the investments.
jroseattle 15y ago
I agree with the general principle, which I've summed up as: "fail fast" is often a cocktail-party excuse for reckless approaches to management. To the OP: I'm relatively an echo chamber for the other comments here. The article qualifies as tl;dr; and would be much more effective with editing. However, I disagree with others that you go the journalism route; it's a blog, and journalism's standards of "we report, you decide" is about facts, not passion. That will turn some people off, but it won't be ambiguous about your intentions. Keep at it.
- michaelochurch 15y ago
  "fail fast" is often a cocktail-party excuse for reckless approaches to management. Well said, and there are ethical reasons why this is unacceptable. Tech demos are supposed to be scrappy. Minimum viable product. Twitter put up a fail whale early in its lifespan. So what? I don't think anyone's career relied on it being 100% reliable, and anyone who did bet his career on such a thing was being reckless. Twitter did the right thing by getting something good enough out there and iterating. Management affects too many people for that approach to be tolerable. You have to actually know what you're doing before you act.
eli_gottlieb 15y ago
Most of us in venture-funded technology are merely bankers, except for the distinction that we buy and sell internet ads instead of securities. Thank you for finally calling them out.
demian 15y ago
In an enviroment where people hate failure, the slogan "fail fast" can help to "tip de balance" to a more iterative and feedback-oriented kind of managment. BUT, when the balance has basically reached the other end, the "slogan" looses it's purpose (because people start failing "too much").
jnt8686 15y ago
I liked this one especially: "On the other hand, a remnant of the flat-out elitist, aristocratic mindset that we have to kill the shit out of every couple hundred years (cf. French Revolution) is the concept that investors, socially speaking, deserve to outrank employees."
- srl 15y ago
  French Revolution is probably a bad example if he's going for "couple hundred years". Y'know, because there were three, in sixty years.
scrame 15y ago
I completely agree with the sentiment, and appreciate the emotional tone. Instead of a tl;dr summary, I think you could actually make a separate, short-attention-span style infographic with the salient points, and have a potent long-form as well. Anyway, good piece! Its more important to keep writing than make every post perfect (its better to get a C in a class than never finish your A+ paper). This one deserves a spit shine. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spit_shine http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spit_shine

No idea if I'm taking the most effective approach here, but these ethical discussions are long overdue and I really hope they'll occur.

GoodIntentions 15y ago
I think the folks that would benefit most from an improvement in ethics are likely to read this without taking away anything more constructive than new ways to 'position' themselves to folks who aren't sociopaths. still worth talking about tho. ( and yeah, a bit long for a blog post, but only minutes to read.. some things take more than 140 characters )
- michaelochurch 15y ago
  I'm not writing this for the unethical people. I'm writing it for the marginally good people who are lazing about while the world burns. I'm a believer in a 10/89/1 model of human morality. (These numbers are approximate.) The Good are 10%. The Bad are 1%. The Weak are 89%. The Good outnumber the Bad and one might expect them to win, but the Bad just as often win because they are willing to go further in their manipulation of the Weak.
  - GoodIntentions 15y ago
    Fundamentally I think we agree. Shepherds, sheep and wolves. If you think you're dealing with a wolf at your level in the company, look up. Ultimately, what the executive allows, it endorses. Odds are they see a man cut from the same cloth, admire his drive, his self interest and and his hard-headedness. If he's still there in a year, I'd say he represents the company's core values.
hluska 15y ago
If you strip out some personal bitterness and spent some serious time with a scorched earth editor, this could be a very effective treatise on the state of ethics and corporate responsibility in the technology industry. You touch on some interesting concepts that deserve thought... Alas, phrases like "snot-nosed kids", "Google's douche-tsunami" and "little sociopath" betray both personal bias and anger. Phrases like these make it too easy to dismiss this article as little more than a rant. I believe that if you're going to call out an industry on ethics, you have to pursue the article as a journalist would. Keep your personal feelings under wraps, tell the whole story and leave the conclusions to your readers. When it comes to proving a point and convincing people to change, passionate journalism always trumps passion on its own.
- michaelochurch 15y ago
  I think I'm going to tighten it up later today. As for phrases like "little sociopath", I want to call people to action on this sort of thing. I want people I've never met to call out and halt their own little sociopaths. I call out Google because it was once a great company, and billions of dollars of value within in it has been destroyed by careerist middle managers who had no right to do so. I feel like Google is symbolic, because it was such a great company for so long. How on earth did a company go from being a cultural leader (in workplace progressivism) to using Jack Welch-style rank-and-yank in a couple of years? Journalistic neutrality, on this sort of issue, either veers toward meaningless abstraction ("one model is...") or conservative fact-based concretion. I want to present the facts, but I also want to present, accurately, the more intangible (but no less real) ether of injustice between them.
  - rhizome 15y ago
    As for phrases like "little sociopath", I want to call people to action on this sort of thing. I want people I've never met to call out and halt their own little sociopaths. Don't try to be manipulative, just lay out your case; neutrality doesn't have to be the goal, but readability would be a plus. One easy place to start is by removing all sentences that include the pronoun "I".
  - 15y ago

Silhouette 15y ago

I'm sorry, I really did try to read this because it sounded like it might interesting, but it's well over 2.5K words and by about halfway through I still had no idea what it was really about. I skipped down to the final paragraph and that still didn't seem to tell me. May I respectfully suggest that future posts this long have a one-line or at least one-paragraph summary at the top?

andywood 15y ago
I think it's more than the lack of a summary. The whole essay could really benefit from a lot more editing and tightening up.
- michaelochurch 15y ago
  I agree. I'm outraged and disgusted by things I've seen over the past 12 months-- some have happened to me, most to other people-- and it's really affecting the quality of my writing.
  - rhizome 15y ago
    A classic technique is to allow someone else to read the essay before publishing it.
    - michaelochurch 15y ago
      I agree with you. Usually I put 1-2 months before writing a blog post/essay and posting it. I just see this matter as a bit more urgent, as I really want to see the American Spring (the 2012 campaign of people calling out unethical behaviors at companies, rather than protecting scummy ex-employers) happen. Words-of-prose can be like lines-of-code: beyond about 500, it takes a long process of review not to have some degree of mess.
  - DavidAdams 15y ago
    I wouldn't be so hard on this essay. It's a little scattered, but there's some gold in there. Writing a concise, powerful essay is really, really hard, which is one of the reasons that people who are really good at it become famous (Jonathan Swift, Christopher Hitchens, etc).

paulsutter 15y ago

I really like the motivating idea behind this post, and read all the way through for that reason. It has some good points (the 30/60/90 PIP example), but it's hard to remember the key points. As a fan of the idea, I hope you can spend a little more time to tighten it up and add some more concrete examples (some of the points seemed a little hard for me to picture concretely).

michaelochurch 15y ago
I guess the key point is: a lot of people are using "fail fast" as an excuse for behaviors that previous generations would consider frankly irresponsible, if not unethical, and I think the general element of scumbaggery that we've seen in technology of late is a result of this absurd ideology.
- furyofantares 15y ago
  What behaviors, exactly? Do you have examples? My apologies if this info is in the second half of the post, I started skimming about halfway through.
  - michaelochurch 15y ago
    No need to apologize. Post was long. Actually, the best list of examples is in another post: http://michaelochurch.wordpress.com/2012/04/07/an-ethical-crisis-in-technology/ http://michaelochurch.wordpress.com/2012/04/07/an-ethical-cr... Snippet: Here’s some shit I’ve either seen, or been credibly informed of, in the past 24 months, most of which was never in the news: no-poach agreements, attempted blacklisting of whistleblowers, a rescinded job offer based on a rumor that suggested PTSD, abuse of process within large companies, extortion of ex-employees, gross breaches of contract, frivolous lawsuits, threats of frivolous lawsuits, price fixing among venture capitalists, bait-and-switch hiring tactics, retaliatory termination, and fraudulent, no-product startups designed to embezzle angel investors.
- jpdoctor 15y ago
  > * that previous generations would consider frankly irresponsible, if not unethical* Both in this article and the "ethical crisis" link therein (http://michaelochurch.wordpress.com/2012/04/07/an-ethical-crisis-in-technology/ http://michaelochurch.wordpress.com/2012/04/07/an-ethical-cr...) makes me think you are young and new to the game. Very unethical and irresponsible behavior has been around a long time. Internet Bubble v1.0 had a world of crap going on, with much bigger dollar-numbers for the investments.

jroseattle 15y ago

I agree with the general principle, which I've summed up as: "fail fast" is often a cocktail-party excuse for reckless approaches to management. To the OP: I'm relatively an echo chamber for the other comments here. The article qualifies as tl;dr; and would be much more effective with editing. However, I disagree with others that you go the journalism route; it's a blog, and journalism's standards of "we report, you decide" is about facts, not passion. That will turn some people off, but it won't be ambiguous about your intentions. Keep at it.

michaelochurch 15y ago
"fail fast" is often a cocktail-party excuse for reckless approaches to management. Well said, and there are ethical reasons why this is unacceptable. Tech demos are supposed to be scrappy. Minimum viable product. Twitter put up a fail whale early in its lifespan. So what? I don't think anyone's career relied on it being 100% reliable, and anyone who did bet his career on such a thing was being reckless. Twitter did the right thing by getting something good enough out there and iterating. Management affects too many people for that approach to be tolerable. You have to actually know what you're doing before you act.

eli_gottlieb 15y ago

Most of us in venture-funded technology are merely bankers, except for the distinction that we buy and sell internet ads instead of securities. Thank you for finally calling them out.

demian 15y ago

In an enviroment where people hate failure, the slogan "fail fast" can help to "tip de balance" to a more iterative and feedback-oriented kind of managment. BUT, when the balance has basically reached the other end, the "slogan" looses it's purpose (because people start failing "too much").

jnt8686 15y ago

I liked this one especially: "On the other hand, a remnant of the flat-out elitist, aristocratic mindset that we have to kill the shit out of every couple hundred years (cf. French Revolution) is the concept that investors, socially speaking, deserve to outrank employees."

srl 15y ago
French Revolution is probably a bad example if he's going for "couple hundred years". Y'know, because there were three, in sixty years.

scrame 15y ago

I completely agree with the sentiment, and appreciate the emotional tone. Instead of a tl;dr summary, I think you could actually make a separate, short-attention-span style infographic with the salient points, and have a potent long-form as well. Anyway, good piece! Its more important to keep writing than make every post perfect (its better to get a C in a class than never finish your A+ paper). This one deserves a spit shine. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spit_shine http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spit_shine