Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

How to Ruin Your Company With One Bad Process

bhorowitz.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 93 posts

Re: How to Ruin Your Company With One Bad Process

#41

Post by meowface »

Thrymr wrote: post #33
meowface wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This attitude baffles me. He's quoting lyrics. Lyrics are lyrics, and the ones he quoted in particular have no racial overtones. And even if they did, who cares? Lots of songs have the words "cunt" and "motherfucker", but quoting those lyrics does not mean you are intending to insult a woman or accuse someone of having an Oedipus complex.

> Lots of songs have the words "cunt" and "motherfucker", but quoting those lyrics does not mean you are intending to insult a woman or accuse someone of having an Oedipus complex. And yet many people (women and men) will find them insulting and offensive nevertheless, regardless of what you say your intent is.

Of course. But many people would also be offended at the word "fuck", such as in "that's fucking great". It's impossible to not offend someone, that's why you write and speak with a target audience in mind. And Horowitz is speaking to the tech and startup industry, which is generally fairly relaxed when it comes to profanity of that nature.

Re: How to Ruin Your Company With One Bad Process

#42

Post by allochthon »

This is an excellent warning to any startups looking at growing quickly. I am living through such a growth effort, and I can definitely see how the culture is changing for the worse in the company.

Counter to the author's general point, I would add that I think well-defined budgeting exercises that lead to clear targets of the kind described in the article, where people are "made accountable," appear hubristic to me. There are so many unknowns that will come up that even to pretend to be able to meet such goals feels off. I'm waiting for management science to catch up with agile development.

Re: How to Ruin Your Company With One Bad Process

#43

Post by wpietri »

nostrademons wrote: post #7

"As a technologist, you know that the worst thing that you can do is over-constrain the problem before you start. You'll kill creativity and prevent yourself from getting a truly great outcome." As an engineer, I love hearing firm constraints from the beginning. The constraints are what breed elegance; there is no such thing as an elegant solution when there is no shape to the problem. It's nice if the constraints ar…

I agree, but for me it's important that the constraints be real. Sometimes when people hear that constraints are good and people love doing the impossible, they just make up arbitrary impossible constraints for their team.

I totally agree with you on shifting away from manager-centric approaches. I really like the Lean focus on customer value. Out from that center are people who directly add value: line workers, engineers, designers. Managers become necessary overhead (when they're just coordinating) or indrect value-adders (when they're helping tune the processes that actually add value). That's in contrast to the traditional western approach, where managers are bosses, people whose opinions win because they're big kahunas.

Re: How to Ruin Your Company With One Bad Process

#45

Post by jacques_chester »

nostrademons wrote: post #7

"As a technologist, you know that the worst thing that you can do is over-constrain the problem before you start. You'll kill creativity and prevent yourself from getting a truly great outcome." As an engineer, I love hearing firm constraints from the beginning. The constraints are what breed elegance; there is no such thing as an elegant solution when there is no shape to the problem. It's nice if the constraints ar…

In art school they say "form is liberating". It gives you direction and relieves you of the oppression of infinite choices. It can give you something concrete to fit into, or subvert.

Form is liberating.

Re: How to Ruin Your Company With One Bad Process

#46

Post by jacques_chester »

michaelochurch wrote: post #21

When I asked my managers what they needed, I unknowingly gamified the budgeting process. The game worked as follows: The objective was for each manager to build the largest organization possible and thereby expand the importance of his function. Through the transitive property of status, he could increase his own importance as well. This will always happen with closed allocation, no matter how much it is tweaked. It'…

Can you name open allocation companies that aren't operating with massive free cashflow? Because you always bring up Valve when raising your theory that open allocation is the magical escape hatch from economics, and it always seems to me that's the only major example you have.

Google and Microsoft also have massive free cashflow and they don't use open allocation. So perhaps the magic of Valve's "open allocation" is that they're just sitting on a cash fountain and it doesn't matter that much how they spend it.

Re: How to Ruin Your Company With One Bad Process

#48

Post by Mz »

As a technologist, you know that the worst thing that you can do is over-constrain the problem before you start. You'll kill creativity and prevent yourself from getting a truly great outcome.

Perhaps "artificially constrain" is the real problem. Constraints that are rooted in real world limitations lead to the elegant design that others are commenting on here. Constraints that are kind of made up BS can, in fact, mess things up pretty badly, just as the author suggests.

I mean, if there is solid logic behind the constraints, it helps foster good problem-solving and good design. But constraints that lack that solid logic can very definitely cause things to go awry.

Re: How to Ruin Your Company With One Bad Process

#50

Post by ahoy »

jacques_chester wrote: post #45
nostrademons wrote: post #7

"As a technologist, you know that the worst thing that you can do is over-constrain the problem before you start. You'll kill creativity and prevent yourself from getting a truly great outcome." As an engineer, I love hearing firm constraints from the beginning. The constraints are what breed elegance; there is no such thing as an elegant solution when there is no shape to the problem. It's nice if the constraints ar…

In art school they say "form is liberating". It gives you direction and relieves you of the oppression of infinite choices. It can give you something concrete to fit into, or subvert. Form is liberating.

I've heard it as "restrictions breed creativity," but I think I like that version much better.
Post reply on HN