Move Fast and Abandon Things

https://engineersneedart.com/blog/movefast/movefast.html

by JKCalhoun • 2 years ago

470 219 2 years ago

mojuba2• 2 years ago

If the goal of this article is to normalize abandoning your projects then I'm not so sure it's a good idea. All else aside it can be a horrendous waste of time and no amount of "at least I've learned something" can justify that. Learn by also finishing stuff, right?

Fellshard• 2 years ago

That is a misreading of the article. It's more about discovery through quick, iterative prototyping, which can include rapid discovery of fatal flaws early.

Dalewyn4• 2 years ago

As Musk would say: Waste metal, not time.

thuruv• 2 years ago

+1 I am reading this is exactly pointing to the same concept as the todo management, but not addressing the todo paralysis. Everyone's mileage may vary. I accept that. Yet misreading something is far more dangerous than ignorance.

ebiester• 2 years ago

The thing is that he also finished stuff.

The goal is to avoid analysis paralysis and "just try it" instead of keep thinking about it.

It's a bias toward action and rejecting sunk cost.

bunderbunder2• 2 years ago

There's a great Smarter Every Day episode where Destin works with a glassblowing shop to create shattered Prince Rupert's drops encased in blocks of resin.

Nobody has done this before, they're working out how to do it as they go along, they make quite a few mistakes along the way. One of the things the video highlights is how, when this happens, the team wouldn't just stop and try the same thing again. They'd keep going, break it all the way, basically just use it as an opportunity to fuck around with their materials.

He waxes poetic about how great this is. They're taking advantage of an unparalleled opportunity to learn more about the behavior of the materials they're working with. Because they're now free to try things they wouldn't want to do if they were still on the path to creating a complete, polished product. It doesn't even really count as taking risks anymore, because you can't really mess up something that's already trash.

And he points out, rightly, that a mindset like that that values learning and experimentation over always succeeding, is one of the best ways to become truly great at what you do.

criddell2• 2 years ago

Like John Lennon once said, time you enjoy wasting isn't wasted.

mojuba2• 2 years ago

Artists can say that, especially if it's John Lennon :) but I'm not sure I can apply it to myself

Mathnerd314• 2 years ago

I think it's a bad title. The moral is more like "work on everything you can think of but don't release anything until it's ready. And some projects will never be ready, but that's OK - you can look at them 30 years later and release them on github for nostalgia." ChatGPT summarizes it as "Build Fast, Ship Never (Until You Do)"

msephton4• 2 years ago

The title is an adaptation of "Move Fast and Break Things" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Move_fast_and_break_things

optymizer• 2 years ago

I think it's healthy for projects to die. It frees up your time to start another project, instead of being stuck in a rut.

I sometimes find myself working on a project that goes nowhere, thinking that if I just put enough effort it will go somewhere, and I'm not having any fun or learning new things. And I'm hard on myself with thoughts like "I need to finish it, I need to finish it" but then when I ask myself: 'why?', it's usually because of this fear of _not finishing the project_ or maybe it's the fear of not being able to distinguish the grinding phase from the failed project phase.

Either way, too many times I have experienced a liberating feeling when I failed. It's a chance to start over.

msephton4• 2 years ago

Survival of the fittest, for sure!

m463• 2 years ago

Maybe take things as far as they should go, but no further.

also: sunk cost fallacy

yard2010• 2 years ago

When working on a personal project, say for fun, what makes the difference between a time wasted and a time spent?

xiaoxiong• 2 years ago

Some of the pixel art in those screenshots is seriously awesome!

karaterobot• 2 years ago

That's a neat blog all around. Lots of interesting stuff to poke around in.

I think it's okay to abandon things, and you can certainly learn things and reuse parts from abandoned projects. For me, a breakthrough moment was when I decided to make things so small that I could finish them. It helped me develop the skill of finishing things, which is a separate skill that's hard to learn, because it only happens at the end of a process so long and hard you almost never make it there. All my friends who are making video games start by writing their own engine, and get burnt out somewhere around the point where they're making a level editor. They learn a lot about things like tooling (which, coincidentally, is a lot like what they already knew how to do), but never actually make the game. It'd be like learning stone masonry by building a cathedral—you won't live to see the end. Start so small that you can't fail, then work your way up to bigger and bigger projects.

eddd-ddde• 2 years ago

I don't think I've ever finished a _single_ personal project. At least for me that's _the_ hardest skill to develop.

EricE• 2 years ago

Luckily this is also on the front page today: https://github.com/readme/guides/finish-your-projects

cezart• 2 years ago

Thank you for sharing this! I think a focus on shrinking personal projects to the point I might actually finish them, might be just what I need right now

bob10292• 2 years ago

All my friends who are making video games start by writing their own engine

I've been there and done that one a few times. Even if you decide to use existing tools, you can easily get caught up in these infinitely-deep pools of complexity.

I am working on a Unity project right now wherein I found myself antagonizing over how to best develop an RTS-style building placement system. Instead of doing what I would typically do (dive right in), I decided that I would rework the game concept to eliminate the need for the player to place buildings at all. After some experimentation, it turned out that this was actually a superior user experience for what I was trying to achieve. I initially rationalized it as "I'll add the building system in the next iteration". It likely won't happen now.

Less is almost always more. That small starting point actually being finished is like nitromethane for the next iteration. Getting to 100% is what makes that next pass so much better. Getting to 80% will leave you feeling like you need to push the rock back up the hill all over again.

lelanthran2• 2 years ago

I decided that I would rework the game concept to eliminate the need for the player to place buildings at all.

This sounds interesting. Can you explain a bit more about this?

burningChrome• 2 years ago

> I think it's okay to abandon things, and you can certainly learn things and reuse parts from abandoned projects.

I recently moved from front-end development into accessibility. Years ago, I had built a bunch of static sites, templates and other design projects that I had eventually abandoned for various reasons.

Now that I'm in accessibility, I've gone back and dug many of these out and have re-built them to be accessible. Several used very old versions of bootstrap, so part of what I did was also upgrading to the latest version of bootstrap as well.

I learned so much just from going back and making those older designs accessible. Its something that I definitely feel gave me a better perspective on stuff we look for when we're assessing sites and applications. It was also a real wake up as to how much of the stuff I built wasn't accessible at all.

chambers• 2 years ago

It helped me develop the skill of finishing things, which is a separate skill that's hard to learn, because it only happens at the end of a process so long and hard you almost never make it there.

Great insight. The skill of finishing what you started, is something that feels elided in discussions around productivity. Is there a blogpost or article that explains it even more?

rurban3• 2 years ago

That's exactly the playbook how they destroyed Perl6 then. They had the very same outspoken motto "Move fast and destroy things". They indeed do so very successfully, instead of fixing just the few outstanding bugs.

wduquette2• 2 years ago

That's not what the OP said. He said, "Try things quickly, and abandon the ones that don't pan out." Nothing in there about destroying things that are working.

rurban3• 2 years ago

I didn't say that. I said that you should not destroy things that dont work. You should rather fix it.

adamc• 2 years ago

I like this and find it interesting, but at an organizational level, it strikes me as trickier to do. A lot of the things we discover about projects and technologies have to do with its feasibility at whatever scale our real projects operate on, and don't necessarily pop-up in smaller experiments. (And sometimes they aren't really technical issues at all, but issues of "can we get most developers here to understand doing it this way.)

None of which means we shouldn't do more of this. You can learn things by trying smaller projects. It's just not a guarantee it will work in the large.

avg_dev• 2 years ago

this seems like a fantastic way to look back on a career where the author started as a prolific solo developer and later became an effective, fast, and contributing part of an effective development team. it was also just really fun to read, about the code reuse, the scrapping of ideas, the rewrites, etc.

specialist• 2 years ago

Yes and:

Quote from another blog entry

"In the end I think Apple got an engineer for the next twenty-five years that, though not the cleverest engineer, was one that worked quickly to prototype new ideas and took on some of the gruntwork that not every engineer wanted to work on."

Some of us like doing the blue-collar parts. Plumbing, prototyping, fixing bugs, fit & finish, tackling tech debt.

Alas, today's leetcode themed hazing rituals, err, interviewing filters out people like me, and presumably John Calhoun.

I was fortunate to manage project and product teams with a mix of skills, temperments, experience. Pairing up doers with esthetes can work out great. In that "whole greater than the sum" sort of way.

FWIW, most of the doers (I've managed or worked with) had no CS education and experience. Just an interest, curiousity in tech. Notables were a ballet dancer, historian, handful of mechanics, biologist, aeronautic engineer, sculpture, and of course musicians. People who would never get hired, much less considered, today.

Every team needs at least one doer.

brendanfinan• 2 years ago

Engineer Sneed Art

gwervc2• 2 years ago

Glad I'm not the only one who parsed the domain as such :)

taeric• 2 years ago

Somewhat related, I think, I am always surprised at how often we don't have non-critical paths in jobs. Half the reason stress is so high, it seems, is we have backed ourselves into a situation where things have to succeed.

mym19903• 2 years ago

The irony of the #3 thing on HN today being this, and the #5 thing being 'Finish Your Projects' haha. Good points all around.

loup-vaillant• 2 years ago

In a sense though, seeing that whatever project we're working on is no longer worth pursuing, is finishing that project.

That's very different from letting life happen and stop working on it without really having decided it.

mathgeek• 2 years ago

I usually think of abandoning and finishing as two different ways to resolve a project. Resolution is a good goal that allows you to be explicit about what was finished or not before stopping.

mym19903• 2 years ago

Closure is important! I do feel that I get in the mindset of saying “I’m gonna get back to this later” and it just never happens, meanwhile taking precious mental capacity every time I think about doing that thing. It’s okay to say “I tried it, I don’t need to prove anything, on to the next adventure”.

parsimo2010• 2 years ago

I think that these ideas are both compatible. In this blog post, it looks like the author finished working prototypes of several games but elected not to push them to a full release. So I think they “finished” the work, and we can’t fault them for estimating that it wouldn’t be worthwhile to make a full release.

Not finishing a project in this case would be abandoning a game idea that you liked before you even got to a working prototype stage. Because then you can’t even see if your new idea plays well.

mym19903• 2 years ago

Yeah totally, I don’t disagree with that assessment. I would say it’s not productive to try to complete every single thing we start. It was just the headline snippets that were funny to me.

Stem0037• 2 years ago

It’s interesting to consider how your guerrilla programming techniques could integrate with contemporary development tools and practices.

For instance, leveraging version control systems more extensively or utilizing collaborative platforms might enhance the efficiency and scalability of your projects.

for_i_in_range• 2 years ago

Some of the worst advice I read comes from some of the smartest people out there.

zackmorris3• 2 years ago

This post really resonated with me, as I have between a dozen and a hundred abandoned projects, mostly games, since I started programming around 1989. Most of them written for the Mac Plus or Mac LC. And many of them following a similar mechanic or art style to the ones in the post.

I think of the few shipped projects I've released or been part of as a shadow of who I am. Same with my resume and work experience. They're a fingerprint of a whole being living a dream life that never manifested, because I never had an early win to build upon. That's why I think UBI might magnify human potential by 10 or 100 fold, to get us from the service economy to agency and self-actualization, producing our own residual incomes.

Oh and I played Pararena a ton!

imchillyb• 2 years ago

If minimum wage didn’t work, what metric makes you believe that a similar system but paying those who don’t work, will?

This type of thinking truly baffles me. This magic UBI will be minimum wage for the masses that don’t work.

How could that, possibly, be sustainable or even good?

alexissantos• 2 years ago

Part of me wonders if this parallels the venture capital approach. Many won't don't anything economically productive with the opportunity UBI affords them, but the ones that do may make the cost worthwhile.

Not sure if that's how it would actually pan out, of course, but I think it's plausible.

malignblade• 2 years ago

Answering your literal question, how could it "possibly" be good:

Minimum wage probably doesn't work because it means a lot of people live in precarity while both emotionally and physically exhausting them. It might just be that minimum wage has stagnated while COL has skyrocketed. If the point of minimum wage is that it provides people with a guaranteed dignified life as long as they are employed, that needs to keep up with the cost of living a normal life in order to keep its effectiveness. That is one reason it might be "failing" although I don't know exactly what you mean by that.

get us from the service economy to agency and self-actualization

This is the thing I think most people have a hard time connecting to "measurable utility" but will probably be the most sweeping effect of UBI or similar. Think about your typical gig worker, minimum wage worker in some high-turnover environment etc. This person probably does not have the financial safety net to pursue something meaningful, or to take the risk reskilling, or to otherwise improve their emotional and financial well-being.

You will probably always have free-riders or people who just want to consume without producing. But is it better to have a society of exhausted, frustrated, barely-hanging-on people, or a society of people with the _potential_ to to be creative, passionate, and exploratory?

Conversely to you, I find it hard to imagine that a society with surplus wealth would be more effective if it chose to subject its people to precarity and emotional strife instead of empowering as many of its people as possible.

Some references: https://www.epi.org/publication/charting-wage-stagnation/ https://www.statista.com/chart/25574/living-wage-vs-minimum-...

agumonkey• 2 years ago

I believe UBI would require a few external attractors / motivators to avoid people being dilluted in choice and fuzzy self actualization path.

HideousKojima2• 2 years ago

How could that, possibly, be sustainable or even good?

It isn't. Like most magical thinking economic proposals, it's simply a matter of ignoring reality.

"In the Carboniferous Epoch we were promised abundance for all, By robbing selected Peter to pay for collective Paul; But, though we had plenty of money, there was nothing our money could buy, And the Gods of the Copybook Headings said: "If you don't work you die.""

...

"And that after this is accomplished, and the brave new world begins When all men are paid for existing and no man must pay for his sins, As surely as Water will wet us, as surely as Fire will burn, The Gods of the Copybook Headings with terror and slaughter return!"

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Gods_of_the_Copybook_Hea...

scott_w• 2 years ago

Minimum wage and UBI aren’t the same thing so you can’t extrapolate the results of one into the other.

Tade0• 2 years ago

Who said minimum wage didn't work? It works, provided you adjust its value regularly.

Anyway, I've met a few people who, through a combination of welfare and inherited wealth don't really have to work.

While most are simply living their best life spending time on unprofitable hobbies like photography one example stands out as he's currently busy driving into Ukraine and back with supplies for the people there.

What I'm getting at is that in reality we don't actually know what would happen under UBI. Maybe more children would be born, as another example from my list is currently a father and (to the best of my knowledge) still jobless?

authorfly• 2 years ago

I do have a different opinion to you, and it was formed during the pandemic when there were UBI-like circumstances for me and my friend group. Those who didn't need to work any more, became rather depressed, quite quickly, compared to those who kept working. And it changed my view on UBI. Maybe in your friend group that was different or your country didn't follow such an approach?

What's the difference between working on several games or focusing and finished one to you?

Would you work on these things enough to produce finished projects if you had UBI? For more than a while?

I think at some life stages, like parenthood or childhood, UBI makes sense. At others, when you are finding yourself - having a responsibility is useful.

scottLobster• 2 years ago

That's why in the sci-fi, utopian economics of the Star Trek Federation they have a "participation based" UBI, where your ticket to the Federation's generous UBI (made possible by effectively infinite material resources) is contingent upon you doing something productive. You can't just sit on your ass all day and collect it.

Now how they measure/judge what's "productive" and the fact that it works at all is what makes it sci-fi, but it highlights that responsibility is critical, even in a utopia.

ericjmorey• 2 years ago

Interesting that I observed the opposite. During the pandemic people I know who had to work were sent into extreme psychological dysfunction that they're still dealing with the fallout that followed. Those that didn't need to work flourished.

jchw3• 2 years ago

Those who didn't need to work any more, became rather depressed, quite quickly, compared to those who kept working.

I'm going to be completely honest with you, I really think you need to consider other reasons why people might be depressed in the situation that occurred during the pandemic. I don't know anyone who was doing particularly well, including those working (heck, people at my job at the time were struggling pretty badly with mental health to the point where they started reaching out to us.)

I'm not even saying this as a person that has a strong opinion on UBI, and I am sure some people sincerely believe not having a job was a major detriment for them. I absolutely think it did help me, but the way I see it, it helped because it was something to cling onto for a bit of normalcy, and of course, a bit of social interaction. Outside of the pandemic, a job is not nearly as critical for those two things.

I also do personally think that I still broadly like having a job, and I have had almost no gaps in employment since I started working professionally. That said, if money were no object, I would absolutely take breaks off of professional work for months at a time. For me, I find both professional work and hobby work important in very different ways, and wish I had dedicated time for both. Anecdotally I've definitely known engineers who periodically take months or even a year off of work when they get the opportunity and it seems to be a very healthy thing for them.

The existence of UBI would maybe tempt people to rely on it even if it is detrimental to their lives, but I think it's wrong to draw the conclusion that it's bad because jobs can be a source of fulfillment for many. In the future it's very possible we're going to need to approach the problem from another angle anyways, since there's simply no guarantee there will be meaningful work for us all in the future. (I'm not really convinced there won't be, but it feels unreasonable to consider it outside the realm of reasonable possibility.)

boerseth• 2 years ago

I doubt it was the UBI-like aspect of the pandemic that caused the depressive states. Isolation, less active lifestyles, locked inside. Imagine UBI, but with the opposite of all of those!

andai2• 2 years ago

I expect that advances in AI and robotics will make most human labor obsolete (economically unviable) in the next few decades. I expect widespread adoption of UBI as a consequence.

I have also considered the fact that most people just sort of "drift" if there isn't an external system forcing them to stay on track. I suspect we're going to see "fake jobs" subsidized by the system for the sake of maintaining widespread sanity.

Well fake jobs isn't quite the right name, rather they'd be real jobs but a portion of the UBI budget (or wherever it comes from) would be spent maintaining a human economy for the people (most people?) who apparently require such a system to stay sane. I say fake because they wouldn't be economically viable without the subsidy.

szundi• 2 years ago

As others commented there can be a dozen other reason to be depressed under the pandemic other than UBI like revenues.

Also UBI does not stop you from doing work. UBI does not want to be a complete replacement of work related revenues, just the basic needs are covered. So if you have a minimum of ambition, you'll go for a job. UBI is just your safety net, so you must not become something that you feel is a slave or stuck in with bad people just to pay rent. Quite different story compared to what you painted here like people just don't work. Also would be interesting to see this unfolding for 10 years. Maybe humans are just lazy but quite the opposite can happen as well and those stories will drag people along. Of course some of us are going to fuck it up that's for sure.

fshbbdssbbgdd• 2 years ago

Does UBI pay enough to support a ski bum lifestyle? That’s probably what I would do if I had guaranteed income with no job.

nawgz• 2 years ago

UBI-like circumstances for me and my friend group
during the pandemic

Lol you really think generalizing emotional states from a global lockdown is smart?

itsthecourier• 2 years ago

Super honest feedback on UBI. I'm glad we saw it develop before us with COVID, there is something there that may work, but simple UBI doesn't work evidently

m3kw92• 2 years ago

Your friends are not working because of people are so used to the “rails” that a job guides them and spoon feed them what exactly to do and with what consequences, this is why UBI isn’t gonna be what that commenter fantasies about. Most people does not have the will power to force and give themselves consequences and stick to it, because they are their own boss.

tacocataco4• 2 years ago

The minimum wage was meant to be a "universal basic wage", and it has been corroded to uselessness over time.

$7.25 an hour

What is different in modern times that would prevent the same from happening to UBI?

treflop• 2 years ago

During the pandemic, my roommate and I built so much shit.

We built a full wooden camper setup with electrical and plumbing. We sketched and crafted new furniture for our apartment. We designed and built our own hydroponics system.

And we skated a lot and hiked where we could. We did also play a lot of video games.

zackmorris3• 2 years ago

I'm replying to you since you got the most upvotes :-)

I take issue with your main point: that not having to work and receiving financial aid cause depression. Did anyone receiving the $1400 pandemic check from the government feel down about it? The notion is frankly preposterous.

From this, we can infer that reducing one's labor burden also doesn't cause depression.

So depression might come from elsewhere: maybe boredom, existential angst, who knows. But it's not pertinent to the debate around UBI.

Now, we can talk about the financial toll of paying taxes for UBI, or the risk of inflation (there is none - that comes from increasing the money supply not incomes - although political machinations tend to preserve wealth at the top), or the collapse of various service industries that profit from underemployment. But those are probably best analyzed in simulation, since like with ventures and startups, there is no way to predict the benefits to society if 1% succeed even if 99% fail or are idle.

My personal take is that sentiment for UBI will fall along political lines. We can use other spectrums for reference:

  * female vs male
  * positive reinforcement vs tough love
  * liberal vs conservative

Since HN is mostly composed of tech workers, I'd predict a male-dominated slant with a preference for tough love and conservative values. It would have an inherent bias towards work over caregiving. So the majority of HN might disfavor UBI, regardless of any actual merits it provides.

I decided to get an estimate of UBI support on HN based on the sentiments of the replies here:

https://deepai.org/chat

  please analyze the text from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41638103 (the text follows the news.ycombinator.com forum comment structure).
  divide the text into a list of replies.
  note that any line starting with ">" is a comment from a parent reply.
  determine the sentiment of each reply as to whether it favors UBI or disfavors UBI.
  count the replies favoring UBI, the replies disfavoring UBI, and the replies that are neutral/defensive/etc about UBI.
  
  * Favors UBI: 12 replies
  * Disfavors UBI: 26 replies
  * Neutral/Defensive: 12 replies

Unfortunately, it started saying "I currently cannot access external websites, including the one you provided" so I had to stop at that preliminary estimate.

I also tried changing the first line of the prompt and with manually pasting the page between "<< ... >>":

  please analyze the text between "<<" and ">>" that I've pasted after this prompt (the text was obtained from a news.ycombinator.com forum and follows the same comment structure).

That returned similar results.

https://chatgpt.com/ has an arbitary length limit that can't separate prompt from context data, which makes it generally useless for this type of work. https://iask.ai has similar limitations which negate its usefulness also.

But going by the first estimate, it looks like about 1/4 of HN users favor UBI, 1/2 disfavor UBI, and 1/4 are neutral.

It would be interesting to see this analysis on a larger sample size.

With 50% of HN seemingly disfavoring UBI, since we're essentially thought leaders in tech, it's highly unlikely that society as a whole will vote to adopt UBI.

I think that's ..sad, for lack of a better word.

We're basically saying that even though we know automation better than anyone, we don't believe that it can lead to a decrease in labor, or that its proceeds should be used to benefit everyone.

I think that's an abdication of our role in working to make the world a better place, and why we got started in tech in the first place.

So without a viable plan of action for getting to UBI, it's probably time to form an independent organization outside of public government and private industry. One that's opt-in, with a commitment to contribute a portion of one's future profits to an even payout of UBI, without means testing.

After a lifetime of struggle with countless losses and no big win, despite hard work on a level that most people probably wouldn't believe, I would opt-in in a heartbeat. And I'm going to make it my life's work to focus on manifesting self-actualization for everyone, starting with bringing about UBI. That's how strongly I believe in its potential to change the world for the better, for us and for future generations.

gwervc2• 2 years ago

UBI won't work: it's almost implemented in my country (you can get 600€/month + many other welfare stuff by not working) and what's the result? Highest public deficit in the EU zone, highest tax rate in the world, rampant criminality, difficulty to get money by working because of said taxes, educated people leaving the country in mass, etc.

mikabasketball• 2 years ago

France?

romeros• 2 years ago

Reality #1: Universal Basic Income (UBI) will empower people to break free from the grind of work. They'll have the freedom to start innovative companies, create art, make music, learn to dance, and generally enjoy happier, less stressful lives.

Reality #2: Alternatively, many might find themselves stuck at home, glued to their screens. This could lead to boredom and depression, resulting in online trolling and petty arguments. Some may even resort to crime out of frustration.

wk_end3• 2 years ago

What you’re describing isn’t UBI; it’s just traditional welfare. UBI advocates are aware of problems with welfare and believe that UBI wouldn’t suffer from the same issues.

nineteen999• 2 years ago

I just call that unfinished stuff "research". I have a bunch of UnrealEngine 4/5 projects I'll never finish, but they were fun from a point of view of testing a game mechanic, rigging and animation, shader development, creating the 3D assets etc.

mihaaly2• 2 years ago

We live different lives. I only played part in projects (none game though) where the product should have been abandoned! In the state released of course. A theoretical option could been to finish it properly. However attempting that would have meant the end of the organization (bankrupcy), that's why saying theoretical option.

Looking at the state of software I have the misfortune to work with and use in private time all of my peers live this life... : (

Luckily the users have no choice then, all need to buy the crap or not buying anything at all. We are safe selling crap!

hadlock• 2 years ago

Can you recommend any resources for writing for system 6/7 on the old 68k devices? I cut my teeth using computers on those but haven't written anything targeted at that platform.

norir• 2 years ago

Abandoning things is essential to development. If we didn't let things go, we'd be stuck with all of our weaker ideas. That doesn't mean they are bad or a waste of time, but rather you reach a point at which you realize there is something better you could be doing and move on. This can be painful but it's necessary.

I keep beating this drum but I believe there is a significant amount of pain in software because people shipped first drafts and got stuck with foundational design issues. Once this has gone on long enough, even a greenfield rewrite is hard because both the programmers and the users have internalized the flawed design.

perrygeo• 2 years ago

And in many cases the entire org chart has been built around the first draft. It's psychologically hard for developers and for people paying the bills to throw stuff away, so we often dig in our heals and accept the first solution that works, along with the tech debt and resulting pain.

Now the drum I keep beating is - software process needs a design phase. You need some plan, some coherent vision of the architecture, otherwise you get a system held together with duct tape and prayers.

Agile made it fashionable to sprint ahead without any coherent plan.

Waterfall obsessed about the plan and failed to adapt to new circumstances.

There has to be somewhere in the middle where a design is subject to empirical testing. We have to change the design based on results of running real code. In other words, when the first draft doesn't work quite right, you don't ignore it (Agile) or try to shoehorn it into the existing design (Waterfall) - you change the design and try again. "Throwing stuff away" could be reframed as the scientific method. This needs to be normalized as a part of the process so we remove the stigma of "failed" experiments, which are not failures but valuable sources of information that improve the final product.

hirvi74• 2 years ago

I'm not sure I am all for abandoning all projects, but I do remember reading a comment on this very website that really resonated with me.

Someone was complaining about always starting projects, but never finishing said projects.

To paraphrase another user's response, it was something like, "Not all projects need to be finished in order for value to be gained. To borrow a concept from Buddhism, perhaps you found what you were looking for all along?"

doublerabbit• 2 years ago

Mines just time. I get home from work, the last thing I want to do is sit in front of my computer.

With two days off a week to fulfil with chores, I still don't want to sit in front of a computer screen.

awesomeMilou• 2 years ago

I'm a junior, currently trying to get an internship and subsequent job.

I envy anyone that can do what you do. At the moment it feels like the industry is a cult, only looking for people that make tech and programming their entire life. I don't even mind the requirements, I have a work ethic and want to perform well, but the expectations seem higher than ever.

I'm looking forward to finally having enough job security for a hobby that doesn't involve staring at computer screens (hoping to get into metal work soon).

JKCalhoun7• 2 years ago

Eventually I got comfortable enough to just take that time that I needed and say, damn the consequences. "Sorry, boss, I was busy with family last night."

And as it turned out that was not the problem that I thought it would be.

EditorOmaha• 2 years ago

I envy anyone that can do what you do.

Nah, almost everyone does what parent does.

Basing your understanding of the industry on HN/blogs/social is just an apex fallacy, it seems everyone is a FAANG 10x-er with plenty of oos contributions. That's far from reality. I gave up on programming in my personal time almost immediately. I've picked up hobbies that require physical work instead.

pton_xd• 2 years ago

Personally I've learned (and earned) way more by shipping small things and THEN iterating on them. Or abandoning them.

dietrichepp• 2 years ago

I’ve been going back and working on retro development. These days, making software for the 68K Macintosh, which is where I learned to program in the first place. I dug a lot through old books, comp.sys.mac.programmer posts, and the source code from Soft Dorothy and others (like the GliderPro source).

It’s a trip seeing this old code through new eyes. I can see why the old Macs crashed so much (beyond the basic “they had no memory protection” explanation). I’m also fond of the 1-bit art, like the author mentions, and I curate a list of accounts on Twitter which post 1-but artwork (if you know anybody who’s missing from the list, let me know): https://twitter.com/i/lists/1578111923324944397

The nice thing about programming for a limited system is that it limits your options. It’s a nice break from the more modern experience where you can do anything by pulling in the right library. I sometimes imagine a world where computational power is frozen, and we simple get better and better software for systems that are well-understood. The thing about these old systems like the Mac 68K machines is that the pace of hardware development was so fast it made you dizzy. If a new processor came out like the 68020 or 80386, then you had maybe a couple years at most to make something that really used it to its full potential. If you waited too long, you’d be competing against a new generation of software written for a new generation of hardware.

JKCalhoun7• 2 years ago

Going back and looking at my code — with over 30 years of hindsight — I want to refactor it, simplify the common crap you had to do like responding to window events, etc....

Never mind making wrapper functions for dealing with Handles and such.

To your point though, wow, how much simpler the Toolbox was compared to a modern OS. It does indeed feel fun to try some retro development again.

msephton4• 2 years ago

I do 1-bit art for a limited platform (Playdate, so not quite Macintosh Plus limited) I'm @gingerbeardman on Twitter. Examples: https://blog.gingerbeardman.com/2024/07/14/shibuya-pixel-art...

jbaber• 2 years ago

I love 1-bit art because of all those dithered images on a 68k mac. I even dither some photos I have for computer wallpapers.

Thank you for the list.

jujube3• 2 years ago

The new Google motto?

pphysch• 2 years ago

Sure, why not. It's a good approach for innovation.

mynameyeff• 2 years ago

Dad??

tkiolp4• 2 years ago

Many companies I have worked for operate like this. Engineers get to work on shiny new features, they get released, everyone is happy. Months later tons of bugs accumulate. The original authors are already part of another team (because “breaking silos”, but actually because “make everyone replaceable”). The engineers that inherit the project need to maintain it and fix the bugs until another team takes over.

It’s awful.

anon7725• 2 years ago

I drew a comparison between “iterate and fail fast” vs “lots of upfront design” as a personal process, rather than a company’s modus operandi. For instance someone might do 2 or 3 prototypes when tasked with delivering a certain feature in order to explore the problem space.

trentnix3• 2 years ago

Such is the hellscape we’ve brought on ourselves from the widespread adoption of “minimum viable product” as the right way to build things. We judge viability by some feature set, not whether the stupid thing is resilient or can be maintained.

It also doesn’t help that “minimum viable” is only one step away from “non-viable”. Every project then becomes like Icarus, testing how close to the sun we can fly before our wings melt.

sweezyjeezy• 2 years ago

But what's the alternative here? "We spent longer than was minimally viable but we still don't have a good idea if it has market fit"-product? In my experience the code usually gets binned whether the idea gets traction or not. Some companies misjudge when to rewrite, but that doesn't make the MVP part of the process wrong.

The absolute greatest wastes of talent and humanity I've ever seen in tech didn't come from tech debt, those efforts were almost always at least working on a product that people were paying money for. The biggest wastes were from over-delivering products that hadn't and were never going to succeed.

jahewson• 2 years ago

I don’t think MVPs are the problem here. Most projects were like this before MVPs were conceived of. Usually the failure is that the project isn’t minimal at all. It’s usually the maximum complexity that a given team can handle.

rorytbyrne2• 2 years ago

MVP is a good approach when interpreted correctly: “minimum” is in reference to the feature set, not the implementation quality.

mihaaly2• 2 years ago

What I'd like to see managing expectations towards the new product well before anything started, considering resource (time, money, workforce, etc.) limitations.

And not going for the shiny things do not fit!

Because limitations are everywhere. Ok, software engineers like to pride themselves in the ability to do anything and everything (not as much as salesguys of course) but this stems from the ninja attitude towards technology and forgetting other dimensions of reality. Should only attempt managable goals on all necessary levels.

I am still waiting for place where this is achieved...

sethammons3• 2 years ago

I don't blame mvp at all. At $prev_gig, we did agile and mvps and all that. BUT we also focused on ownership. You build it, you support it. Forever, or until officially handed off and accepted by another team. Everything has an owner.

You can still get teams who are scared of what they own and refused to update it, but that is a whole lot of "and so? Do it" when you have a healthy product backlog that is single stack priority and the higher priority thing requires output from them (while a pain, it didn't happen _that_ often).

To be fair, $prev_gig was a very well ran company in a lot of ways and better than any other shop I have been in.

mind_heist• 2 years ago

completely correct, but I dont think thats where OP is coming from or what the article intends to suggest either. Its recommending that you try multiple things, get a feel for whats technically feasible & if it looks interesting to the customer and push that forward. Its very well applicable to indie devs & also applicable to large companies to some extent. This philosophy is great to identify the feature/product you want to spend meaningful time on.

In fact, one could wager that the situation you described is directly a consequence of not adhering to what OP is suggesting.

srpablo• 2 years ago

I often joke that every startup job post Series A is you playing Viscera Cleanup Detail[1] for the "heroes" of the pre-PMF stage

[1] https://store.steampowered.com/app/246900/Viscera_Cleanup_De...

dr_kretyn• 2 years ago

What a jargon-rich sentence. No idea what you wrote.

konfusinomicon• 2 years ago

having been the original author on a company defining feature and then told that the silo must be broken only to see my work stepped on for years to come i wholeheartedly agree. the inheritors not qualified to make the decisions, my grand ideas pushed to the side, and having watched the incompetance in managing said feature has been a hard thing to overcome and im still salty about it every time a stupid bug arises. especially when warnings were raised with ample time to adjust. but i learned an important lesson and i can say with certaintly that i wont hesitate to be perceived as an asshole and die on hills about it the next time

KennyBlanken• 2 years ago

The current state is like an internal, employee-level Not Invented Here.

m3kw92• 2 years ago

Google?

Yodel0914• 2 years ago

One of the things I like about my current project is that more than half of the original team have stuck with it after we went live. The work itself is, admittedly, a bit less interesting, but it’s rewarding in a different way.

stevage• 2 years ago

What you're describing doesn't seem to relate to the post at all.

worstspotgain• 2 years ago

"Make Everyone Replaceable," by the same people who brought you "Return to the Office." Sometimes it's code for "Prevent Competition From Rising Through the Technical Ranks."

It's one of those interesting and infuriating things. There's a category of PHB managers who can't code, can't design, can't inspire, can't really do marketing well at all. They're marginally more skilled and way less funny than Michael Scott.

Their advantage is being unencumbered by knowledge. They don't suffer the technical decision-making process. They don't try to compete on the value-added charts. By not really caring, they sail through dotting the i's and just forget about the t's. The product ships with a hundred blemishes and two major flaws. It was rushed out the door by the asshole with the padded resume and the HR surfing history.

They abused the flaws in the system to subvert the meritocratic outcome. From their perspective, they did what they had to do to "win."

znpy• 2 years ago

The original authors are already part of another team (because “breaking silos”, but actually because “make everyone replaceable”)

I've been there and i've inherited some stuff to manage, and it's painful.

But there's another side of this, which is even more painful and definitely infuriating: some people get to stay on the same project for years, and they become "key people" just because they've either A) stumbled on the issues before or B) have introduced the issues themselves.

This is completely infuriating because now you have to play cat and mouse with these people to get help, and they get to play the "super busy, everybody ask me stuff" role because they're the only people with that historic knowledge.

Needless to say, they can also back the claim they deserve a promotion (and a salary increase) by executing on.this playbook. And they usually do.

I've seen this thing happen in pretty much all company sizes (200 people, 1000 people, 500k+ people).

At this point, after almost ten years in the industry, I'm starting to think this is the winning playbook for the meta-game: go rogue in a maliciously-compliant way, artificially claim superiority over your peers, get promoted.

sevensor• 2 years ago

Importantly, the author abandoned the efforts before releasing them, which rather takes the curse off.

pards• 2 years ago

I worked at a Canadian bank that operated like this. They had one "rock star" UI/UX developer that was deployed to build every new customer-facing initiative, but they moved them to the next project as soon as the current one made it to the testing phase.

The residual team was left to clean up their code and make it work, which often involved significant rework.

I raised my concerns with management that they were cheating their "rock star" dev out of valuable learning experiences and perpetuating the problem - the dev made the same errors on each new project. Not to mention, perpetuating their testing nightmares.

not_your_vase• 2 years ago

  > The difference between the 10x dev and 1x dev is that the former creates bugs 10x faster

munificent2• 2 years ago

John, your games were an inspiration to me when I was a kid first learning my way around programming on the Mac. I spent a lot of time playing Glider and even more playing Pararena. I still have the echo-y startup sample of that lodged in my head.

I probably spent even more time poking around in the resource forks of your games in ResEdit.

I didn't finish much, but I did complete a couple of little shareware games and uploaded them to AOL. I was beyond surprised when a check from far away California appeared in my mailbox many months later.

Those early Mac days really did feel like a special time where anything was possible a solo developer could make a thing and put it out into the world without needing more than creativity and time.

Thank you for writing these posts and sending me down memory lane. I hope you're enjoying your retirement.

JKCalhoun7• 2 years ago

Maybe you read some of the other posts of mine (or the README's for the disk image repos). It was a special time.

Was it special because it was all new to us as early computer-users, early developers? Or was there something different in the air back then....

I'm glad you liked the little games I wrote.

Was it the check from California that pushed you into your current career (whatever that is)?

munificent2• 2 years ago

I did end up being a game programmer at EA for eight years and still do software today. I'm not sure if the check from California sealed the deal, but it was definitely a memorable experience for me. It made me feel like the code I wrote was real in a way that it hadn't before.

chr15m• 2 years ago

this is the way

screaminghawk• 2 years ago

I love this but I approach it a bit differently. I don't think this is a good excuse to write bad or unmaintainable code. Sure some shortcuts are fine but it should be useful for the next person.

Personally I try to use free hosting services so that I don't have to pay to keep it running when I abandon it. (That could be AWS free tier or blockchain or IPFS etc). Use a public repository so someone else can find it when it's inevitable dropped. I always make sure to have good documentation so that once it's found anyone can get it running.

jongjong• 2 years ago

When I read articles like this, I feel nostalgia and envy. Why was I not born 10 years earlier? I see other people in my industry who are 10 years older than me and they not only had a way more fulfilling career, they are much better off financially too. It's like everything fell on their lap.

quasse• 2 years ago

I don't think this is an unfair perspective.

When I started programming professionally (post dotcom crash mid-2000s) you could really achieve results that were considered game-changing for businesses as a solo contributor writing all your own code from the ground up. The field as a whole had not been really mapped out all the way, so even someone of moderate intelligence like me could feel like they were creating new useful things (especially on the web).

Modern software development frequently feels like gluing together towers of shit from other people's towers of shit. Additionally, the parts of the industry where the business case is "a computer could markedly improve this process and make people's lives so much easier" are pretty much saturated. The high paying career opportunities that are left generally seem to trend towards either value extraction or rent-seeking behavior.

JKCalhoun7• 2 years ago

I actually agree completely with you — feel, frankly, like I retired at the right time in the arc of "programmer" as a career.

At the same time I suspect that those that came before us are happy to have also had a career where they also wrote the firmware, OS, boot-loader — feel our generation had to build software on top of shitty OS dylibs, etc.

JKCalhoun7• 2 years ago

Wait ten years and see how you feel about these times — and how others, ten years younger, feel about you.

I have always been envious of the kids that wrote the Apple II text adventures, envious of the Woz's that built 8-bit computers in a time when "anything goes".

Financially, time addresses that.

I had student debts, made only a little money for a while. But, over time, you pay down your debts, begin to put money away ... compound interest and all that.

But on a more ... spiritual level ... I see now that in life I have, from time to time, come to crossroads where I could choose one path or another. If you have gained any wisdom up to that point in your life there is a good chance you will choose the path that will bring you closer to what it is you seek. If it is financial comfort you seek, you're going to find that you more often than not choose the path toward financial success.

We only wish though that the spending money had come when we were younger.

ang_cire• 2 years ago

Move Fast and Abandon Things: The Google Story

jakswa• 2 years ago

The car prototype reminded me of Spy Hunter graphics, but I couldn't remember that NES game's name at first. Sent me on a nice nostalgia dive!

msephton4• 2 years ago

Great to see this do numbers. I posted it last week but it didn't gain any traction

Move Fast and Abandon Things

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