5 ms·
Everything Is Always Broken
- mrgreenfur 14y agoThis is reassuring, if a bit scary. I'm at a successful mid-size post-'startup' company now and things are still pretty broken. What size do things stop being broken? At 50 employees, are things broken? How about 100? 200?
- btrautsc 14y agoDefinitely scary - but normal. You'll have to ask someone much smarter/ more experienced than I. We're still young/'agile'...
- chipsy 14y agoOn average things get more broken, not less, because a small company can only break so much before it simply stops working altogether, while a big one can absorb enormous blows of failure and continue on inertia alone, while simultaneously taking many more minds and bodies along for the ride. Nearly everything in software is based upon a mad scramble to create value without collapsing. When software manages to not collapse for decades, we look upon it with 20/20 hindsight, thinking, "wow they did great engineering," but really, it's the same as thinking the Romans were great architects because of the things they built that by chance stood for a few thousand years.