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by robocat 482 days ago
> professionalism." That was before "move fast, break things

I think you're professing a false dichotomy. Is it unprofessional to "move fast, break things"?

I'm a slow moving yak shaver partly due to concious intention. I admire some outcomes from engineers that break things like big rockets.

I definitely think we learn fast by breaking things: assuming we are scientific enough to design to learn without too much harm/cost.

2 comments

> I admire some outcomes from engineers that break things like big rockets.

I work in unmanned aerospace. It started with 55lb quadcopters and got… significantly bigger from there.

I’ve thought a ton about what you’re saying over the last 5-6 years. I have broken things. My coworkers and underlings have broken things. We’ve also spent a bunch of time doing design review, code review, FEA review, big upfront design, and all those expensive slow things.

Here’s, for me, the dividing line: did we learn something new and novel? Or did we destroy kilobux worth of hardware to learn something we could have learned from a textbook, or doing a bit of math, or getting a coworker to spend a few hours reviewing our work before flying it?

And I 100% agree with your last statement: you can “move fast and break things for science” professionally. But… if something breaks when you weren’t expecting it to, the outcome of the post-mortem really should be surprising new knowledge and not “this made it to prod without review and was a stupid mistake”

> Is it unprofessional to "move fast, break things"?

Most of the time it is. The sorry state of software in general is a testament to that.