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The Fallacy of Move Fast and Break Things

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Re: The Fallacy of Move Fast and Break Things

#21

Post by rjkennedy98 »

jasode wrote: post #14

The "move fast and break things" is just a web app version of previous sayings in other domains: - "A ship in harbor is safe but that's not what ships are made for." - "If I've made more shots than you, it's because I've _missed_ more shots than you." -- variations of this from Michael Jordan, Wayne Gretzky, other athletes - "All great writers got better by writing a lot of _bad_ sentences." - "If you want to learn h…

My favorite is by Samuel Beckett:

> Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.

Re: The Fallacy of Move Fast and Break Things

#23

Post by lnenad »

jasode wrote: post #14

The "move fast and break things" is just a web app version of previous sayings in other domains: - "A ship in harbor is safe but that's not what ships are made for." - "If I've made more shots than you, it's because I've _missed_ more shots than you." -- variations of this from Michael Jordan, Wayne Gretzky, other athletes - "All great writers got better by writing a lot of _bad_ sentences." - "If you want to learn h…

Yeah, like many things in our sphere things are taken literally (I am guessing since it's always easy to criticize) and are taken like they're a global pattern every programmer in the world should follow (same goes with microservices, k8s etc...).

Re: The Fallacy of Move Fast and Break Things

#24

Post by lnenad »

sremani wrote: post #17
jasode wrote: post #14

The "move fast and break things" is just a web app version of previous sayings in other domains: - "A ship in harbor is safe but that's not what ships are made for." - "If I've made more shots than you, it's because I've _missed_ more shots than you." -- variations of this from Michael Jordan, Wayne Gretzky, other athletes - "All great writers got better by writing a lot of _bad_ sentences." - "If you want to learn h…

I think it comes down to volume and rate of corrections. You will inevitably make mistakes in many endeavors and most mistakes are not fatal, but while making mistakes the rate of correction during this time puts you on the right path. Most of the criticism of "move fast and break things" is word thinking. The move fast part includes "rate of correction".

It's also the size of the corrections, doing daily builds probably means you've changed a small piece of functionality and even if stuff breaks it's usually a quick fix, whereas doing them monthly/bimonthly carries a much higher risk of completely breaking stuff and is much harder to fix.

Re: The Fallacy of Move Fast and Break Things

#25

Post by dahart »

> The 2019 report showed elite companies have 46 times more frequent code deployments than low-performing teams and a 2,555 times faster lead time to move from code commit to deploy to support their initiatives to move faster.

> Yes, elite teams ship faster. But, their changes are 1/7 as likely to fail, and they recover from incidents 2,604 times faster than low-performing teams.

Since the report is behind a form, and the form is having trouble loading for me right now, I’ll just ask if anyone knows the context behind these numbers?

These numbers seem very large for any kind of average; are they choosing the most extreme cases? I feel like they also only make sense in units of seconds or minutes, otherwise we’re comparing hours to weeks or days to years.

Re: The Fallacy of Move Fast and Break Things

#26

Post by Hokusai »

codingdave wrote: post #5

It is not a motto, it is an anti-pattern. When you are still prototyping and have not found product-market fit, it might work. (And that quote comes from the early days of Facebook, when it was still morphing into its final form.) Once you have established yourself as a viable product, found your fit, and have paying customers, "break things" becomes a path to poor service.

> Once you have established yourself as a viable product, found your fit, and have paying customers, "break things" becomes a path to poor service.

Yes. I have seen this too many times. People are creatures of habit. I have seen people from small companies try to run after the growth a company 10x or 50x bigger like if nothing has changed. I have also heard of, not seen by myself, directives from big companies going to smaller ones trying to apply all their processes and checks to just a couple of teams.

Each strategy is correct for the company situation. There are no silver bullets.

Re: The Fallacy of Move Fast and Break Things

#27

Post by braythwayt »

sremani wrote: post #17
jasode wrote: post #14

The "move fast and break things" is just a web app version of previous sayings in other domains: - "A ship in harbor is safe but that's not what ships are made for." - "If I've made more shots than you, it's because I've _missed_ more shots than you." -- variations of this from Michael Jordan, Wayne Gretzky, other athletes - "All great writers got better by writing a lot of _bad_ sentences." - "If you want to learn h…

I think it comes down to volume and rate of corrections. You will inevitably make mistakes in many endeavors and most mistakes are not fatal, but while making mistakes the rate of correction during this time puts you on the right path. Most of the criticism of "move fast and break things" is word thinking. The move fast part includes "rate of correction".

With respect... I would say that a great deal of the criticism I’ve seen is of behaviour that can be summarized as, “Move fast and break things for other people. But if we’re achieving our objectives, no need to correct.”

It is not fair to characterize all “Move fast and break things” as falling into this egocentric bucket, but My anecdotal experience is that this is what attracts the most criticism.

Re: The Fallacy of Move Fast and Break Things

#28

Post by dasil003 »

codingdave wrote: post #5

It is not a motto, it is an anti-pattern. When you are still prototyping and have not found product-market fit, it might work. (And that quote comes from the early days of Facebook, when it was still morphing into its final form.) Once you have established yourself as a viable product, found your fit, and have paying customers, "break things" becomes a path to poor service.

I feel this reasoning easily slips into no-true-Scotsman territory. Did FB have product-market fit in 2006? 2008? 2013? They didn’t just move fast during prototyping, this went on for years and years of hypergrowth. There was customer backlash at each major release as they overhauled the product but it turns out they knew better than the customers themselves knew what they wanted.

Friendster and MySpace by contrast slowed way down once they hit traction, but it didn’t enable them to solve their scalability issues.

Re: The Fallacy of Move Fast and Break Things

#29

Post by [deleted] »

jasode wrote: post #14

The "move fast and break things" is just a web app version of previous sayings in other domains: - "A ship in harbor is safe but that's not what ships are made for." - "If I've made more shots than you, it's because I've _missed_ more shots than you." -- variations of this from Michael Jordan, Wayne Gretzky, other athletes - "All great writers got better by writing a lot of _bad_ sentences." - "If you want to learn h…

[deleted]

Re: The Fallacy of Move Fast and Break Things

#30

Post by jcelerier »

dasil003 wrote: post #28
codingdave wrote: post #5

It is not a motto, it is an anti-pattern. When you are still prototyping and have not found product-market fit, it might work. (And that quote comes from the early days of Facebook, when it was still morphing into its final form.) Once you have established yourself as a viable product, found your fit, and have paying customers, "break things" becomes a path to poor service.

I feel this reasoning easily slips into no-true-Scotsman territory. Did FB have product-market fit in 2006? 2008? 2013? They didn’t just move fast during prototyping, this went on for years and years of hypergrowth. There was customer backlash at each major release as they overhauled the product but it turns out they knew better than the customers themselves knew what they wanted. Friendster and MySpace by contrast s…

> it turns out they knew better than the customers themselves knew what they wanted.

do we live in the same universe ? facebook has already one full step in the big storage room with myspace, omegle, etc. most teens I know laugh at you if you say you're using facebook like you're some decrepit old person.

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