"Fail fast" is no excuse for being a moron, flake or scumbag

http://michaelochurch.wordpress.com/2012/04/08/fail-fast-is-not-an-excuse-for-being-a-moron-a-flake-or-a-scumbag/

by michaelochurch • 14 years ago

57 34 14 years ago

michaelochurch.wordpress.com

No idea if I'm taking the most effective approach here, but these ethical discussions are long overdue and I really hope they'll occur.

GoodIntentions2• 14 years ago

I think the folks that would benefit most from an improvement in ethics are likely to read this without taking away anything more constructive than new ways to 'position' themselves to folks who aren't sociopaths.

still worth talking about tho. ( and yeah, a bit long for a blog post, but only minutes to read.. some things take more than 140 characters )

michaelochurch12• 14 years ago

I'm not writing this for the unethical people. I'm writing it for the marginally good people who are lazing about while the world burns.

I'm a believer in a 10/89/1 model of human morality. (These numbers are approximate.) The Good are 10%. The Bad are 1%. The Weak are 89%. The Good outnumber the Bad and one might expect them to win, but the Bad just as often win because they are willing to go further in their manipulation of the Weak.

hluska• 14 years ago

If you strip out some personal bitterness and spent some serious time with a scorched earth editor, this could be a very effective treatise on the state of ethics and corporate responsibility in the technology industry. You touch on some interesting concepts that deserve thought...

Alas, phrases like "snot-nosed kids", "Google's douche-tsunami" and "little sociopath" betray both personal bias and anger. Phrases like these make it too easy to dismiss this article as little more than a rant.

I believe that if you're going to call out an industry on ethics, you have to pursue the article as a journalist would. Keep your personal feelings under wraps, tell the whole story and leave the conclusions to your readers. When it comes to proving a point and convincing people to change, passionate journalism always trumps passion on its own.

michaelochurch12• 14 years ago

I think I'm going to tighten it up later today.

As for phrases like "little sociopath", I want to call people to action on this sort of thing. I want people I've never met to call out and halt their own little sociopaths.

I call out Google because it was once a great company, and billions of dollars of value within in it has been destroyed by careerist middle managers who had no right to do so. I feel like Google is symbolic, because it was such a great company for so long. How on earth did a company go from being a cultural leader (in workplace progressivism) to using Jack Welch-style rank-and-yank in a couple of years?

Journalistic neutrality, on this sort of issue, either veers toward meaningless abstraction ("one model is...") or conservative fact-based concretion. I want to present the facts, but I also want to present, accurately, the more intangible (but no less real) ether of injustice between them.

Silhouette• 14 years ago

I'm sorry, I really did try to read this because it sounded like it might interesting, but it's well over 2.5K words and by about halfway through I still had no idea what it was really about. I skipped down to the final paragraph and that still didn't seem to tell me. May I respectfully suggest that future posts this long have a one-line or at least one-paragraph summary at the top?

andywood• 14 years ago

I think it's more than the lack of a summary. The whole essay could really benefit from a lot more editing and tightening up.

michaelochurch12• 14 years ago

I agree. I'm outraged and disgusted by things I've seen over the past 12 months-- some have happened to me, most to other people-- and it's really affecting the quality of my writing.

bluekeybox2• 14 years ago

Halfway through I got a feeling that (a) the author doesn't know what he's writing about, (b) he's never read Eric Ries, otherwise he would at least state somewhere early a different interpretation of what "fail fast" could mean.

michaelochurch12• 14 years ago

I did, actually. In systems, failing fast (as opposed to silent failure) is a good thing. Technical fast-failure is often correct. Better to catch the bug at compile time than at runtime. Better to throw an exception than do the wrong thing. Full agreement. No question there. That's because failure is objective and should be reported (and acted on) fast.

I haven't read Eric Ries, so I have no opinion of him. I know that people are using "fail fast" to justify being ethically sloppy. I don't have any basis for assessing whether this has anything to do with Ries. Quite probably, it doesn't.

paulsutter• 14 years ago

I really like the motivating idea behind this post, and read all the way through for that reason. It has some good points (the 30/60/90 PIP example), but it's hard to remember the key points.

As a fan of the idea, I hope you can spend a little more time to tighten it up and add some more concrete examples (some of the points seemed a little hard for me to picture concretely).

michaelochurch12• 14 years ago

I guess the key point is: a lot of people are using "fail fast" as an excuse for behaviors that previous generations would consider frankly irresponsible, if not unethical, and I think the general element of scumbaggery that we've seen in technology of late is a result of this absurd ideology.

furyofantares• 14 years ago

What behaviors, exactly? Do you have examples? My apologies if this info is in the second half of the post, I started skimming about halfway through.

jpdoctor• 14 years ago

> * that previous generations would consider frankly irresponsible, if not unethical*

Both in this article and the "ethical crisis" link therein (http://michaelochurch.wordpress.com/2012/04/07/an-ethical-cr...) makes me think you are young and new to the game.

Very unethical and irresponsible behavior has been around a long time. Internet Bubble v1.0 had a world of crap going on, with much bigger dollar-numbers for the investments.

jroseattle• 14 years ago

I agree with the general principle, which I've summed up as: "fail fast" is often a cocktail-party excuse for reckless approaches to management.

To the OP: I'm relatively an echo chamber for the other comments here. The article qualifies as tl;dr; and would be much more effective with editing. However, I disagree with others that you go the journalism route; it's a blog, and journalism's standards of "we report, you decide" is about facts, not passion. That will turn some people off, but it won't be ambiguous about your intentions.

Keep at it.

michaelochurch12• 14 years ago

"fail fast" is often a cocktail-party excuse for reckless approaches to management.

Well said, and there are ethical reasons why this is unacceptable.

Tech demos are supposed to be scrappy. Minimum viable product. Twitter put up a fail whale early in its lifespan. So what? I don't think anyone's career relied on it being 100% reliable, and anyone who did bet his career on such a thing was being reckless. Twitter did the right thing by getting something good enough out there and iterating.

Management affects too many people for that approach to be tolerable. You have to actually know what you're doing before you act.

eli_gottlieb• 14 years ago

Most of us in venture-funded technology are merely bankers, except for the distinction that we buy and sell internet ads instead of securities.

Thank you for finally calling them out.

demian• 14 years ago

In an enviroment where people hate failure, the slogan "fail fast" can help to "tip de balance" to a more iterative and feedback-oriented kind of managment. BUT, when the balance has basically reached the other end, the "slogan" looses it's purpose (because people start failing "too much").

jnt8686• 14 years ago

I liked this one especially: "On the other hand, a remnant of the flat-out elitist, aristocratic mindset that we have to kill the shit out of every couple hundred years (cf. French Revolution) is the concept that investors, socially speaking, deserve to outrank employees."

srl• 14 years ago

French Revolution is probably a bad example if he's going for "couple hundred years". Y'know, because there were three, in sixty years.

scrame• 14 years ago

I completely agree with the sentiment, and appreciate the emotional tone.

Instead of a tl;dr summary, I think you could actually make a separate, short-attention-span style infographic with the salient points, and have a potent long-form as well.

Anyway, good piece! Its more important to keep writing than make every post perfect (its better to get a C in a class than never finish your A+ paper).

This one deserves a spit shine.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spit_shine

"Fail fast" is no excuse for being a moron, flake or scumbag

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