41–50 of 71 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Easy to say when you don't hold the pager.
What's that supposed to mean? I am just agreeing with the previous comment... early stage Facebook had a mentality in the spirit of the original article, and as they grew had to stop it. That's all. Just agreeing.
Move fast and break things > Move fast with stable infra
In most companies I've worked, approval process is the scar tissue of years of mistakes. In every case where you need to ask for approval to do something, you can probably trace back in the company's history and find the past mistake that some goofball made that necessitated getting approval to do something like that. Someone got us sued. Someone lost us some money. We need to take some kind of corrective action and…
Basecamp was founded in 1999 so I think they've had time to make plenty of mistakes. While I don't dispute the idea of approval processes as scar tissue, perhaps most companies scar too easily. I mean that both in the sense of being fragile and in the sense of over-reacting.
In most companies I've worked, approval process is the scar tissue of years of mistakes. In every case where you need to ask for approval to do something, you can probably trace back in the company's history and find the past mistake that some goofball made that necessitated getting approval to do something like that. Someone got us sued. Someone lost us some money. We need to take some kind of corrective action and…
Basecamp is a small company (~50 employees) that is headed by leaders who put an uncommonly extreme level of thought into how the company should operate. From my vantage point they feel like a "philosophical experiment" in technology company leadership. They also do things that many companies would never think of doing, like cutting most of their products and focusing on only one. Friedman and DHH are great thought l…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Easy to say when you don't hold the pager.
What's that supposed to mean? I am just agreeing with the previous comment... early stage Facebook had a mentality in the spirit of the original article, and as they grew had to stop it. That's all. Just agreeing.
Sure, we all know the trick to startup success. Sprint as fast as you can for that cliff and hope the cliff moves before you get there.
I wonder how many programmers secretly work on their pet projects during work time.
I wonder how many programmers secretly work on their pet projects during work time.
This only works when you have the hiring process dialed in and you're selecting the right candidates to work from you.
Exactly. I once had the conversation about bottom-up vs top-down decision making with my CEO, and his point was essentially that the people we've hired can't be trusted with that level of responsibility. For me this was proof that our hiring process needed to improve, for him it was proof that our supervision process needed to improve. There's a great book about companies run through bottom-up decision making called…
In most companies I've worked, approval process is the scar tissue of years of mistakes. In every case where you need to ask for approval to do something, you can probably trace back in the company's history and find the past mistake that some goofball made that necessitated getting approval to do something like that. Someone got us sued. Someone lost us some money. We need to take some kind of corrective action and…
"Process is an embedded reaction to prior stupidity" -- Clay Shirky The root problem is that while process is usually something that's quickly thrown onto the pile, there's rarely any companies that continuously revisit process in order to remove as much of it as possible as soon as it doesn't make sense anymore. We do that religiously and it makes a huge difference. Recently we even got rid of our Daily Standup beca…
>If you can make a decision and you don’t think it’s going to get you fired, just do it. This advice only applies to people with enough experience. I'm thinking of a certain ex-employee that followed that advice all the time, despite us constantly correcting him. Even on their final day, they was still insisting that they was doing good work. To this day, we are still finding code they wrote or modified that is wrong…
In most companies I've worked, approval process is the scar tissue of years of mistakes. In every case where you need to ask for approval to do something, you can probably trace back in the company's history and find the past mistake that some goofball made that necessitated getting approval to do something like that. Someone got us sued. Someone lost us some money. We need to take some kind of corrective action and…
"Process is an embedded reaction to prior stupidity" -- Clay Shirky The root problem is that while process is usually something that's quickly thrown onto the pile, there's rarely any companies that continuously revisit process in order to remove as much of it as possible as soon as it doesn't make sense anymore. We do that religiously and it makes a huge difference. Recently we even got rid of our Daily Standup beca…
IMO, the problem is any specific process is going to evolve to the point where people just go through the motions. But, without stability people are more likely to keep thinking from new angles.