[1_2__4]

Counter-argument: A positively staggering amount of decisionmaking at a company consists of "look at what other, successful companies are doing and mimic them". It's cargo cult management by the very definition: they see the other people doing the correct incantations and bounty fall upon them. Clearly, we just need to utter those same incantations and we'll have the success they did.

And I'd further counter that: yeah, actually, you and your company ARE special. Every company is. There is no One True Way of running a business, or any individual aspect of that business. Everyone's triangulating around resources, people, industry, corporate vision, etc. If anything I'd say the argument that "you are not special" is the fallacy, as it leads directly to the kind of cargo-culting that you see so many failed companies do.

Finally, when we see successful companies, how often is it because they just mimicked what everyone else was doing? Not very frequently, as it turns out. Well-behaved companies seldom make history.

[908B64B197]

> Counter-argument: A positively staggering amount of decisionmaking at a company consists of "look at what other, successful companies are doing and mimic them". It's cargo cult management by the very definition: they see the other people doing the correct incantations and bounty fall upon them. Clearly, we just need to utter those same incantations and we'll have the success they did.

They never do.

I recall talking to someone who was very very happy to brag that his company was doing "everything just like Google" and following the exact same practices he read the company did on various engineering blogs.

I asked him what was the compensation like and how he managed to get kids from Stanford to work at his company instead of their startups and he just gave me a blank stare. Said something about how they were not in Silicon Valley and paid median salaries and that he had "no trouble finding Google caliber talent in the local market." and that "it's not really the local market's customs to give stocks to coders".

I think someone ended up buying the whole thing. Not the company but the office furniture they left after going broke.

[ska]

> Not very frequently, as it turns out.

I don' think this is quite right - it's probably important to do something differently, but likely equally important not to do too much differently.

[cgrealy]

I'm talking about the standard things that people do that are common across companies.

Absolutely make your USP special.

But logging? DB access? Deployment? Those are generally solved problems and unless you have a very good reason not to... "doing what everyone else does" is going to be a lot less pain in the long run.

[mbrodersen]

Yep there are many solutions to the same problems out there. So thinking is required to choose the solutions that works best in your specific situation. Taking into account your business, team, customers, runtime environment etc. etc. Simply cargo copying somebody else without understanding the pros/cons is what crappy devs do.