[Karrot_Kream]

> In a sense inefficiency is a goal, because otherwise you loose redundancy. It costs a lot to hire 100 to produce the output of 10, but much lower risk.

The problem is the velocity hit you take by doing this is its own risk that's not tracked in the same way predictability and bus factor are. I'll bet one of the core reasons OpenAI was able to release a ChatGPT style product so much faster than Google, despite Google coming up with the fundamental Transformer breakthroughs, is this difference in velocity. And when a startup begins to erode a calcified, highly redundant larger company, then the larger company has the risk of becoming irrelevant along with all of its internal redundancy.

[drewcoo]

> The problem is the velocity hit you take by doing this is its own risk that's not tracked in the same way predictability and bus factor are.

I think there's a better way to think about risk here.

There's lower risk with the predictable team. Those are so common, especially in established business, that we can even treat this as the default state.

If you so wish, you can take on more risk and seriously slim down and get work done faster. And it will almost certainly be faster on a large enough time scale, but because it's less predictable, you're now playing schedule chicken.

The kind of risk that you bring up, risk of being less risky and going slower . . . is really just opportunity cost. And it's ok to take that on as a tradeoff for something else, too, if you do it with eyes wide open.

Risk is not a thing to be avoided. It is a thing to harness to gain an edge on competition. After all, without risk there is no profit.

[dilyevsky]

> The problem is the velocity hit you take by doing this is its own risk that's not tracked in the same way predictability and bus factor are.

Yep, this is known as McNamara Fallacy - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/McNamara_fallacy

[Karrot_Kream]

I think this is more specific than just the McNamara Fallacy (thanks for the link, I knew of the fallacy but didn't know it's name.) Big tech businesses usually optimize for risk reduction in the core business. The specific untracked metric here is that of competition. Big tech seems to go around it by trying to acquire promising competitors, but with a higher anti-trust appetite in the current administration, that's becoming less effective. And even with huge acquisition offers, it just takes one breakthrough competitor to bring a calcified risk-obsessed big tech company to its knees.