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> professionalism." That was before "move fast, break things I think you're professing a false dichotomy. Is it unprofessional to "move fast, break things"? I

• tonyarkles 2y ago
  > I admire some outcomes from engineers that break things like big rockets. I work in unmanned aerospace. It started with 55lb quadcopters and got… significantly bigger from there. I’ve thought a ton about what you’re saying over the last 5-6 years. I have broken things. My coworkers and underlings have broken things. We’ve also spent a bunch of time doing design review, code review, FEA review, big upfront design, and all those expensive slow things. Here’s, for me, the dividing line: did we learn something new and novel? Or did we destroy kilobux worth of hardware to learn something we could have learned from a textbook, or doing a bit of math, or getting a coworker to spend a few hours reviewing our work before flying it? And I 100% agree with your last statement: you can “move fast and break things for science” professionally. But… if something breaks when you weren’t expecting it to, the outcome of the post-mortem really should be surprising new knowledge and not “this made it to prod without review and was a stupid mistake”
• int_19h 2y ago
  > Is it unprofessional to "move fast, break things"? Most of the time it is. The sorry state of software in general is a testament to that.