3 ms·

Perfectionism is the practice of seeking perfection, not achieving it. Lots of devs spend time not shipping because they feel their code isn't good enough. Mean

Perfectionism is the practice of seeking perfection, not achieving it. Lots of devs spend time not shipping because they feel their code isn't good enough. Meanwhile Crowdstrike built a $62bn company shipping things. Poor quality things that break the internet, but that's kind of besides the point. If you want to build value you must ship, even if the thing isn't ready yet because otherwise it will never ship and there will never be any value realized.

godelski 2y ago
Exactly! And it's important to remember that while the outage did economic damages north of $5 billion, that this is not a cost to Crowdstrike, but to their customers. So the take away is ship fast because the costs of shitty code will be felt mostly by people who are not you! Sarcasm aside, you're not wrong about people being caught up in perfectionism but that doesn't make you right about people/managers conflating perfectionism with goodenoughism. I'm sure with this error (and many others) you can find someone who was trying to solve the problem/s and someone else that accused them of perfectionism. I rarely see actual perfectionism, but I do frequently see people disagreeing what is good enough. I also frequently see problems that would have been small at the time but to fix later on require massive expenditures. The problem is that not-good-enough compounds while good-enough is neutral. You need to also dedicate time to maintenance and repair, because that's what fixes not-good-enough, which frequently happens simply because we aren't omniscient.
- onion2k 2y ago
  while the outage did economic damages north of $5 billion If you're going to measure the dollar value cost of their errors as a cost of CrowdStrike being in business, shouldn't you balance that against the dollar value of savings from the attacks they've stopped?
  - godelski 2y ago
    Not exactly, but close. You need to balance against the dollar value of savings from attacks they've stopped BUT that their competitors would not have. Just comparing against the attacks they stopped is a naive and gross overestimation because it requires an assumption that if a customer did not use CrowdStrike they did not use _any_ alternative. In reality, Crowdstrikes customers would have used some other product. So the attacks that competitors could have also defended against cannot be accurately attributed to Crowdstrike. i.e. if Edison didn't invent the light bulb someone else would have. We know this because he didn't invent it, though he did make the first practical version[0]. But since we're on topic, I'd call what I suggested a "good enough" estimation. We have a reasonable estimate under reasonable constraints. It's more complex, but the amount of accuracy gained is tremendous. Arguably the other model is so inaccurate it is less than meaningless (it isn't even "back of the envelope") because its conclusions would lead us to believe things that are not true, and far from the truth. But if we want to talk about _actual perfectionism_, well this gets much more complicated much more quickly. In fact, gets exponentially complex in exponential time. A true analysis needs to consider the counterfactual question of what if Crowdstrike did not exist at all. This is far more complicated and contains many subltities that could dramatically change the results. Because we need to understand things like how other companies would have advanced and developer were the money/manpower/resources that were allocated to CrowdStrike were allocated to others. To understand how CrowdStrike both creates and discourages competition in the space. Systems like these are (mathematically) chaotic. Who knows, maybe a manager at Crowdstrike pissed off an employee who then turned blackhat. But maybe Crowdstrike gave a job to someone who would have turned black hat would they not have gotten hired. Maybe because they were laid off from a competitor! Realistically performing these calculations to a solution that is accurate (which would still be probabilistic in nature) is intractable. Of course we can improve our earlier model by using some of these factors, but I want to illustrate that there's a difference in perfectionism which is unachievable from being reasonably accurate ("good enough"). [0] Left unknown is how quickly someone else would have come to similar practicality but my best understanding of this specific story is that it would not have been long. This is not an uncommon story in science and technology and if you look hard enough you'll almost always find that any discovery or invention was also being pursued by another group. There are exceptions, but they are rare. You just never hear about the other groups, but you can confirm this by watching advancements that happen while we're alive and can see the competition in real time. Specifically in domains where you are close to.

godelski 2y ago

Exactly! And it's important to remember that while the outage did economic damages north of $5 billion, that this is not a cost to Crowdstrike, but to their customers. So the take away is ship fast because the costs of shitty code will be felt mostly by people who are not you! Sarcasm aside, you're not wrong about people being caught up in perfectionism but that doesn't make you right about people/managers conflating perfectionism with goodenoughism. I'm sure with this error (and many others) you can find someone who was trying to solve the problem/s and someone else that accused them of perfectionism. I rarely see actual perfectionism, but I do frequently see people disagreeing what is good enough. I also frequently see problems that would have been small at the time but to fix later on require massive expenditures. The problem is that not-good-enough compounds while good-enough is neutral. You need to also dedicate time to maintenance and repair, because that's what fixes not-good-enough, which frequently happens simply because we aren't omniscient.

onion2k 2y ago
while the outage did economic damages north of $5 billion If you're going to measure the dollar value cost of their errors as a cost of CrowdStrike being in business, shouldn't you balance that against the dollar value of savings from the attacks they've stopped?
- godelski 2y ago
  Not exactly, but close. You need to balance against the dollar value of savings from attacks they've stopped BUT that their competitors would not have. Just comparing against the attacks they stopped is a naive and gross overestimation because it requires an assumption that if a customer did not use CrowdStrike they did not use _any_ alternative. In reality, Crowdstrikes customers would have used some other product. So the attacks that competitors could have also defended against cannot be accurately attributed to Crowdstrike. i.e. if Edison didn't invent the light bulb someone else would have. We know this because he didn't invent it, though he did make the first practical version[0]. But since we're on topic, I'd call what I suggested a "good enough" estimation. We have a reasonable estimate under reasonable constraints. It's more complex, but the amount of accuracy gained is tremendous. Arguably the other model is so inaccurate it is less than meaningless (it isn't even "back of the envelope") because its conclusions would lead us to believe things that are not true, and far from the truth. But if we want to talk about _actual perfectionism_, well this gets much more complicated much more quickly. In fact, gets exponentially complex in exponential time. A true analysis needs to consider the counterfactual question of what if Crowdstrike did not exist at all. This is far more complicated and contains many subltities that could dramatically change the results. Because we need to understand things like how other companies would have advanced and developer were the money/manpower/resources that were allocated to CrowdStrike were allocated to others. To understand how CrowdStrike both creates and discourages competition in the space. Systems like these are (mathematically) chaotic. Who knows, maybe a manager at Crowdstrike pissed off an employee who then turned blackhat. But maybe Crowdstrike gave a job to someone who would have turned black hat would they not have gotten hired. Maybe because they were laid off from a competitor! Realistically performing these calculations to a solution that is accurate (which would still be probabilistic in nature) is intractable. Of course we can improve our earlier model by using some of these factors, but I want to illustrate that there's a difference in perfectionism which is unachievable from being reasonably accurate ("good enough"). [0] Left unknown is how quickly someone else would have come to similar practicality but my best understanding of this specific story is that it would not have been long. This is not an uncommon story in science and technology and if you look hard enough you'll almost always find that any discovery or invention was also being pursued by another group. There are exceptions, but they are rare. You just never hear about the other groups, but you can confirm this by watching advancements that happen while we're alive and can see the competition in real time. Specifically in domains where you are close to.