Ask forgiveness, not permission
venturehacks.com
Ask forgiveness, not permission
1–10 of 23 posts
Re: Ask forgiveness, not permission
#2Every single company under the sun says that they follow this practice. But the reality is that very few companies actually follow through. Even startups who swear up and down they give their engineers complete control over what they build.
Re: Ask forgiveness, not permission
#3Would love HN wisdom!
We're using Twitter to build an NLP app, and everyday we're wondering if they will just pull the plug on us.
We have a friend at Twitter in Ops: ask permission or forgiveness?
Re: Ask forgiveness, not permission
#4Venture Hacks blog is back? Oh... I hope so!
Re: Ask forgiveness, not permission
#5Would love HN wisdom! We're using Twitter to build an NLP app, and everyday we're wondering if they will just pull the plug on us. We have a friend at Twitter in Ops: ask permission or forgiveness?
The underlying question of your comment is whether this is a stable business model. You already indicate that Twitter has the ability to disrupt/shutdown your service, which puts you in a difficult situation to build something of value. If you are ever wildly successful and dependent on one platform, then that platform will extract value from you or replace you. Consider this a rule, not a guideline, because it always makes business sense for the platform to do that. Recent examples include Zynga paying the Facebook "tax," Craigslist effectively shutting down PadMapper, and the slew of Twitter 3rd party apps that have been crippled by limited/revoked access.
Re: Ask forgiveness, not permission
#6Developers shouldn't have this kind of control unless your product is for developers. I say this as a developer.
The article mentions it only works if you hire insanely smart people, but that's also not a sufficient condition. You can have really amazing programmers, but if they don't have a strong understanding of your demographic and your goals, they're not "smart" in the way that's most relevant to this particular sort of decision.
I also dislike the phrase to begin with. Asking forgiveness rather than permission is often more effective, but that doesn't mean it isn't also irresponsible and a breach of trust. In an environment that doesn't claim this sort of non-regulation (i.e. most of them), if your integrity sells for the value of one commit and the risk of breaking or misdirecting your employer's project, you have more fundamental problems than potential bugs in production.
Re: Ask forgiveness, not permission
#7Right, the problem is most people who claim to do so NEVER ask for forgiveness...
OTOH I don't accept he sentence but that is a different question.
Re: Ask forgiveness, not permission
#8Developers shouldn't have this kind of control unless your product is for developers. I say this as a developer. The article mentions it only works if you hire insanely smart people, but that's also not a sufficient condition. You can have really amazing programmers, but if they don't have a strong understanding of your demographic and your goals, they're not "smart" in the way that's most relevant to this particular…
If you have the freedom to make decisions, you also have the responsibility of being correct.
I'm not sure of the full intentions of the article nor your comment, but I think you may have missed a major point here. The article does not seem to argue that insanely smart people know all the right answers; instead it argues that insanely smart people have a pretty good idea when something is a bad idea, and will be the type of person who works out the right answer prior to pushing it live. That said, the other cases is covered as well...
Actually, mistakes are fine. They’re something you trade off for other variables like speed of iteration.
Re: Ask forgiveness, not permission
#9Every single company under the sun says that they follow this practice. But the reality is that very few companies actually follow through. Even startups who swear up and down they give their engineers complete control over what they build.
>But the reality is that very few companies actually follow through.
Because asking your customers to pay you for a product/service when you also expect them to be your testers is going to lose you a lot of customers long-term in most markets. If something doesn't work consistently, or they are constantly finding new issues they will simply find another company to work with. Not to mention, by letting people push whatever they want to production and waiting for a customer to report issues you are counting on people to actually submit bug reports & not just ignore/abandon the issue.
Re: Ask forgiveness, not permission
#10Without controls in place, let's see how much "forgiveness" you receive from the SEC and Sarbox enforcers when things go awry and shareholders lose out.