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How to Ruin Your Company With One Bad Process

bhorowitz.com

61–70 of 93 posts

Re: How to Ruin Your Company With One Bad Process

#61

"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.

This is quite good. Too many choices are indeed a source of misery.

Re: How to Ruin Your Company With One Bad Process

#62

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…

Isn't SuperCell (Clash of Clans) using open allocation as well ? They did it before becoming a cash fountain.

My feeling is that open allocation is the most efficient with very dedicated employee and strong constrains. The manpower limitation being one of these constrains. Self organization is also more efficient with few people because communication is then more efficient. Obviously when the number of employee grows, these two conditions are much harder to met. Cashflow can only hide the inefficiency.

Re: How to Ruin Your Company With One Bad Process

#63
post #23
post #2

"If you quadruple your engineering headcount in a year, you will likely have less absolute throughput than if you doubled headcount. As an added bonus, you will burn way more cash." This is a great point (although I hate the term "headcount"). It takes time to get engineers up to speed in any organization, and it usually cuts into the productive time of current engineers.

Read a story once where someone said at a company wide meeting with the CEO, if you continue to refer to us as "headcount" then we're going to start calling you "overhead".

I don't understand what's wrong with the term "headcount".

Re: How to Ruin Your Company With One Bad Process

#64
> Note that this does not apply to you if you have very small numbers. It's fine to grow engineering from one to four people or from two to eight. However, if you try to grow from 50 to 200, you will cause major issues if you are not extremely careful.

That's why I haven't bought his book. It just doesn't seem relevant for the kinds of smaller companies I'm interested in.

Re: How to Ruin Your Company With One Bad Process

#65

"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…

Constraints gave us Facebook instead of Myspace. Constraints gave us Twitter. Constraints gave us Snapchat. Social networks have thrived on obvious constraints. When looking for a startup idea, sometimes I try to reimagine a popular tool or service with additional constraints.

I doubt it was constraints that made Facebook become more popular, or any other technical reason. It's too bad MySpace isn't what people use anymore. I'd like having all the customization of my home page on Facebook.

Re: How to Ruin Your Company With One Bad Process

#67

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…

Have you ever considered that Valve is successful because of open allocation? It's not like this massive cashflow was conferred upon them by God.

That success exists because they're doing things right.

If you look at closed-allocation software companies that succeed, what you find is that a politically fortunate subset does exist on essentially open-allocation terms. They work on what they want, where they want, aren't penalized for creative output, and get shit done. That small percentage ends up driving the whole company. That being the case, why not improve the odds by giving more people (or, even, all the engineers) that freedom?

Google and Microsoft also have massive free cashflow and they don't use open allocation.

Microsoft has been in decline for 15 years and a large part of that is stack-ranking, which goes hand-in-hand with closed allocation.

Google is doing OK, but it's in cultural decline and has been since the ~2009 introduction of more traditional management... which is around when Google's engineering organization became more rigidly closed. (From 2002-2007, Google was somewhere between open and closed allocation, solidly mid-spectrum because it was engineer-driven.)

Re: How to Ruin Your Company With One Bad Process

#68

"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.

"Form is liberating" is also cited in The Mythical Man-Month.

Re: How to Ruin Your Company With One Bad Process

#69

Interesting article for sure and I think it highlights exactly how you get unwanted bloat and how to prevent it. Budgeting has always been a dark art, especially for creative work, and adding smart constraints on the front end are some ways to reign things in - however I think this largely applies to the companies who can say the following: "we had plenty of cash in the bank." I know for us our budgeting process is,…

> I think this one is particularly egregious given that the quote includes the term "nigga" - even though it was of course self censored - which I don't think is particularly appropriate coming from a white man. I think it's fine that you don't like the word 'nigga'. If you don't like hearing something, it's your prerogative to tell people that so they'll stop saying it. But realize that by giving white people a doub…

> But realize that by giving white people a double standard in terms of how they can express themselves, you're being racist against white people, and for black people, furthering the racial and cultural divide. Rationalizing treating people differently based on the color of their skin isn't any less racist just because you're on the populist, politically-correct side.

No you're not, you're being entirely consistent. The rule is simple - don't be offensive and context counts.

Taking race out of it - you can say something to or about your wife, girlfriend, husband or boyfriend which if I were to say it would be offensive. That's not a double standard, that's context. There is relationship (or lack of), a history (or lack of) and so on, all of which contributes.

Sadly, this does mean that simple, easy rules often aren't possible but that fact that those rules are complicated doesn't mean white people get to cry "racism" over a word which has historically been both offensive and oppressive, regardless of whether there is an attempt to reclaim that word.

All that's not to say that there can't be racism against white people - there can - just that this isn't it.

For what it's worth, I think if you're quoting a song (or work of literature, poetry or whatever), I think there is little reason to censor whoever you are, so long as you're doing it genuinely and reasonably (as opposed to just using it as an excuse to say something you wouldn't otherwise be able to).

Re: How to Ruin Your Company With One Bad Process

#70
post #33

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.

Which is fine but the stigma against being generally offensive is less than the stigma against being racially offensive (not to mention the law).
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