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by rektide
1177 days ago
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It's wild host so many companies make doing the right thing extremely hard. I've never been at a big org, and sometimes we are super profitable & trying to make big long term investments in the future, and folks seem to want to rush & smash code & go go go. My pace has almost always felt a bit off, but I've always hated shipping subpar systems. Whether it's other engineers or some local managers or the business, there's always been extreme pressure in competition with my desire to just do a good damned job. It's been isolating & draining. Sometimes it's just a matter of spending 3x as long as it would have taken to line up the 300 reasons why at each spot the shit slapdash plan is shit and the good plan is good. Trying to be OK with the process, walking through people who really barely can understand any of... You have to just keep saying to yourself, fine, this is my job, I'm the expert, it's OK that you don't know, & I'm not sure that you do need to know, but here we are & this talking it through is how we're going to decide where we go I guess. |
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The primary job of an executive is risk management. Let’s say I run an engineering team where people have good ideas 70% of the time, and bad ideas 30% of the time. Famously, it takes 10x the number of resources it originally took to develop and deploy, to remove a bad system from production and replace it.
.7 * 4 + .3 * 3 = 3.7
.3 * 11 + 0.7 = 4.0
An engineering team that doesn’t take 3x the time it takes to do something to verify it ahead of time is actually slightly less efficient overall ( assuming that 3x the time it takes reduces the error rate to 0)
Yea there are lots of simplifying assumptions here, these are all averages, plans don’t all take the same time, etc, etc, etc, and a more sophisticated system would take it all into account. But the results don’t usually change, unless in very special circumstances.