[mcculley]

This seems to assume that all "private industry" does things in a way different than how government does.

Different kinds of projects have different needs for upfront design. One can quickly ship and iterate on an online dating app. One cannot launch a new space shuttle every two weeks and keep trying until the crew survives the mission.

[WalterSear]

>This seems to assume that all "private industry" does things in a way different than how government does.

It does. A skeleton crew would be abandonware.

[mcculley]

I don't understand your reply. I'm familiar with private industry projects producing high-risk projects requiring lots of long term up front investment in capital and time and private industry projects working low-risk efforts where using the customers as testers is perfectly fine. Likewise there are small units of government entities that can iterate on low-risk projects in addition to the big infrastructure projects that larger government organizations work on.

I think the OP is painting with too broad a brush when talking about "private industry".

[mcculley]

I responded to this question, but now I see that I was missing your point. (It doesn't help that the HN title changed to something other than the article title after it was posted.)

There are plenty of private industry shops maintaining software on a skeleton crew that needs no more features or a bigger market. Again, this article is assuming that all private industry only serves a growing market. There's plenty of software already written and being profitably maintained by skeleton crews to happy customers.

[daveguy]

Or a startup.