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Why “Move Fast and Break Things” Doesn’t Work Anymore

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Re: Why “Move Fast and Break Things” Doesn’t Work Anymore

#51

Post by kortilla »

paulie_a wrote: post #32
lowdose wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Last October the U.S. Military replaced the eight 1970s floppy disks controlling all nuclear missiles. https://www.forbes.com/sites/zakdoffman/2019/10/19/us-milita...

They had no need to upgrade. If anything they had a massive need to downsize the inventory of weapons. Plus the security protection was shockingly irresponsible. The code was all zeros

Downsizing is orthogonal to needing to upgrade. You still need to maintain whatever amount remains and that could call for software upgrades in light of a new issue.

Re: Why “Move Fast and Break Things” Doesn’t Work Anymore

#52

Post by asveikau »

paulie_a wrote: post #32
lowdose wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Last October the U.S. Military replaced the eight 1970s floppy disks controlling all nuclear missiles. https://www.forbes.com/sites/zakdoffman/2019/10/19/us-milita...

They had no need to upgrade. If anything they had a massive need to downsize the inventory of weapons. Plus the security protection was shockingly irresponsible. The code was all zeros

Floppy disks physically degraded pretty easily. Seems like it could be a safety issue.

Re: Why “Move Fast and Break Things” Doesn’t Work Anymore

#53

Post by asveikau »

ori_b wrote: post #30
kerpele wrote: post #11

I think the big issue with companies like Facebook is not that their development model moves too quickly for them to be able to react to their issues but that they simply don’t care. Facebook has known about the issues with privacy, hyper targeted advertising etc for years. You don’t need to move very fast to react to a fundamental issue in that timeframe.

You call it an issue. We call it a revenue stream.

And here's another point where we may disagree: money is not a thing to be worshiped at the cost of everything else.

Re: Why “Move Fast and Break Things” Doesn’t Work Anymore

#54

Post by kinkrtyavimoodh »

kerpele wrote: post #11

I think the big issue with companies like Facebook is not that their development model moves too quickly for them to be able to react to their issues but that they simply don’t care. Facebook has known about the issues with privacy, hyper targeted advertising etc for years. You don’t need to move very fast to react to a fundamental issue in that timeframe.

Or perhaps they do know exactly how much consumers care about these issues (spoiler: not much), and are simply building for their consumers. The few hundred / thousand people flooding Twitter and opinion columns don't speak for the 2 billion people who use Facebook.

Re: Why “Move Fast and Break Things” Doesn’t Work Anymore

#55

Post by jacquesm »

ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #27

I don't think it ever worked that well, but I have also always followed a different muse than the current zeitgeist. I think that SpaceX is living proof that you can move very fast indeed, without breaking things. As we well know, they do, very rarely, break things (with great video), but when that happens; it only happens once .

That's about as nice an example of survivorship bias as you could find. SpaceX came within a whisker of ceasing to exist. If that one launch had failed it would have been game over for them. But they got lucky that time and they have done a fantastic job at keeping their eye on the ball ever since. Every business has one or more of those critical moments in time when things just have to go your way. If you are in a business where breaking things is your only option to succeed at all then you should. SpaceX gambled and won, and breaking things is still the way of the world in rocketry and likely will be for some time.

Re: Why “Move Fast and Break Things” Doesn’t Work Anymore

#56

Post by softwaredoug »

Move fast/break things works great when the risks associated with the “breaking” are minuscule, experiments can be measured and isolated, and the upside for experimentation high (UI tweaks, recsys or search algo improvements, social media, etc).

Move slow, keep things working works well when breaking things has a huge downside and safe experimentation on live customers near impossible. Such as medicine, legal compliance, building airplanes, utilities.

Re: Why “Move Fast and Break Things” Doesn’t Work Anymore

#57

Post by netcan »

joshred wrote: post #40
netcan wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well put. Concise. I will quibble though on the "now we can slow down and optimize them" part. What's happening in practice is that those startups who "lucked" into successes playing the risky-but-many game of mobile & internet technology... those startups now focus on defending their "moats" and optimising their revenue streams.

Hey quibbler, you defend a castle (not a moat).

In the spirit of quibbling:

Moat: from Medieval Latin mota: “a mound, hill, a hill on which a castle is built, castle, embankment, turf”

In the spirit of mixed metaphors:

business catchphrase for the 20s: stock your hill with crocodiles

Re: Why “Move Fast and Break Things” Doesn’t Work Anymore

#59

Post by ryguytilidie »

jevgeni wrote: post #24
throwGuardian wrote: post #14

Please, someone tell the geniuses at Harvard business that no one ever used "Move Fast, break things" for chips. Having been in the industry long enough, I've seen plenty a launch date moved, and chip-respins executed in favor of risking a recall of hardware from the field. It's only non-critical, consumer/casual software/applications that can afford to move fast, and break things. Your bank, or medical records, or e…

The geniuses at HBR never claimed in the article that it applies to chips. The article says that increase in chip performance lead to a prevalent strategy in business (mainly tech) to be the first.

Its crazy how tribalistic HN has become. The whole Boeing fiasco has produced SO MANY "gosh, all those MBAs are at fault. I assign 0 fault to the engineers!" and every. single. time. There is a problem relating to a management/engineering decision, blame from HN ALWAYS goes to "the MBA types" and very literally never to engineering.

I guess I just don't understand what the point of this type of tribalism is? Feeling better about your team while lamenting how everyone else is stupid seems pretty unhealthy.

Re: Why “Move Fast and Break Things” Doesn’t Work Anymore

#60

Post by ChrisMarshallNY »

jacquesm wrote: post #55
ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #27

I don't think it ever worked that well, but I have also always followed a different muse than the current zeitgeist. I think that SpaceX is living proof that you can move very fast indeed, without breaking things. As we well know, they do, very rarely, break things (with great video), but when that happens; it only happens once .

That's about as nice an example of survivorship bias as you could find. SpaceX came within a whisker of ceasing to exist. If that one launch had failed it would have been game over for them. But they got lucky that time and they have done a fantastic job at keeping their eye on the ball ever since. Every business has one or more of those critical moments in time when things just have to go your way. If you are in a b…

Point taken, but they also don't keep breaking the same things, over and over; simply because it is not cost-effective to avoid the breakage.

Makes business sense, but I've always been one of these knuckleheads that wants to write great code; simply because I like to do it.

I got into the habit of practicing zero-tolerance on quality. I've never found any level of breakage acceptable in my own work. I literally get physically uncomfortable when I know there's a bug in my code, and I have been known to get out of bed at 2AM, and go downstairs to fix it.

I know that I'm fortunate to be in a place where I am free to do that. I don't need to run in the rat race.

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