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How to Ruin Your Company With One Bad Process

bhorowitz.com

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Re: How to Ruin Your Company With One Bad Process

#81

Post by jacques_chester »

michaelochurch wrote: post #67
jacques_chester wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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.

Have you considered that every company which stumbles into a network-effects monopoly is successful regardless of how they run the place? "Conferred by lucky timing" is still an exogenous cause. We've learnt from the Windows and mobile App Stores that you can wind up in this position with and without creative output penalties and management bullshit.

> 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.

It's definitely declining. It's been declining for decades. This decline has taken the form of a business so profitable that 4 out of 5 divisions by themselves would qualify as Fortune 500 entries.

And Google has been drinking cash from the same river for its entire life. The only diversification from advertising revnue they have is mobile devices, and it's only because they bought Motorola outright.

If you own a gold mine, you make profits because the market demands gold. Not because you are good to your staff, or bad to your staff. What makes you successful is the ownership of the gold mine.

Like I said, you have (so far as I can tell) one and only one example of any seriousness. One data point does not uphold a theory which completely ignores that economics is the subject of satisfying unlimited wants with limited means in the face of unlimited arrangements.

Re: How to Ruin Your Company With One Bad Process

#82

Post by jacques_chester »

chmike wrote: post #62
jacques_chester wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> Obviously when the number of employee grows, these two conditions are much harder to met.

This is what I mean about the "magical escape hatch from economics". Coordination is easy if you have massive surplus, because you can recover from any fuckups.

In constrained environments on large problems, it falls to bits. Toyota delegates serious authority to its workers, but they are still working inside a system they help to design. It's not an ivory tower sitting next to a golden brook.

I'd be interested to see how many companies use open allocation that have succeeded and how many have failed. I'm going to guess that the failure rate is pretty close to the mean failure rate for all new businesses.

Re: How to Ruin Your Company With One Bad Process

#83

Post by jacques_chester »

danielweber wrote: post #68
jacques_chester wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 .

It's entirely possible I picked it up from there. I frequently think of brilliant sayings and discover Brooks got there first and better.

Re: How to Ruin Your Company With One Bad Process

#84

Post by [deleted] »

chmike wrote: post #62
jacques_chester wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

[deleted]

Re: How to Ruin Your Company With One Bad Process

#85

Post by chrisweekly »

true_religion wrote: post #26
chrisweekly wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"constraints are what breed elegance" This; 1000x this. I think this is also the reason so many really old-school video games are still not just playable, but can actually (arguably, of course) be even more fun than most of the current-gen eye candy. I'm thinking of Pac-man, Joust, and their ilk. Talk about embracing constraints. EMBRACE CONSTRAINTS!

I remember the 'old school' and there were plenty of poor quality games; its just that very few of these have survived 20 years or more to be shopped around as examples of the past.

Great point. Perhaps a better example might have been something like http://js1k.com/.

Re: How to Ruin Your Company With One Bad Process

#86

Post by chrisweekly »

afarrell wrote: post #29
true_religion wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I remember the 'old school' and there were plenty of poor quality games; its just that very few of these have survived 20 years or more to be shopped around as examples of the past.

Survivorship bias. "If all our airplanes keep getting japanese bullets in the wings and tail, don't put more armor there--that's were we don't need it. Put it where the airplanes that don't survive get shot." - Abraham Wald

Great comment (and quote!) -- totally agreed. But my having used a mediocre example doesn't counter the gist, that constraints can and do breed elegance. (shrug)

Re: How to Ruin Your Company With One Bad Process

#87

Post by afarrell »

afarrell wrote: post #29
true_religion wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I remember the 'old school' and there were plenty of poor quality games; its just that very few of these have survived 20 years or more to be shopped around as examples of the past.

Survivorship bias. "If all our airplanes keep getting japanese bullets in the wings and tail, don't put more armor there--that's were we don't need it. Put it where the airplanes that don't survive get shot." - Abraham Wald

I really should have clarified that this isn't actually a quote; It is a paraphrase of some of the work he did during the war.

Re: How to Ruin Your Company With One Bad Process

#88

Post by afarrell »

chrisweekly wrote: post #86
afarrell wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Survivorship bias. "If all our airplanes keep getting japanese bullets in the wings and tail, don't put more armor there--that's were we don't need it. Put it where the airplanes that don't survive get shot." - Abraham Wald

Great comment (and quote!) -- totally agreed. But my having used a mediocre example doesn't counter the gist, that constraints can and do breed elegance. (shrug)

I do agree with your conclusion that constraints can lead to elegance. I just think that your point about old video games wasn't a good argument in favor of it.

I also think there is a better point to be made about what sorts of constraints produce elegance and which ones are just frustrating and produce hacky workarounds. I think in order to make that point, someone would have to do some engineering history research and some insightful thought to see how an engineer's mindset and a projects constraints interact to produce elegance. I suspect the development of those video games could be a fruitful place to look for that history.

Re: How to Ruin Your Company With One Bad Process

#89

Post by rodgerd »

the_real_bto wrote: post #76
rodgerd wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which is a refutation of the idea in the essat that the best engineering happens when there are no constraints.

I'm not sure I follow. I see the constraint of the first system as the natural fear of failure that comes from doing something new. It is an implicit constraint. The second system is less constrained in my view than the first.

The author of the essay linked seemed to be asserting that freedom from constraints will produce more wonderful solutions.

My interpretation of Brooks' observation on second systems is that they're what happens when the first system has been enough of a success to give people a relatively free hand to solve problems with it - so they try to solve all the things and wind up with an over-ambitious and unusable system, from which a pared-back third system emerges.

Re: How to Ruin Your Company With One Bad Process

#90

Post by srik »

kbouck wrote: post #19
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…

To borrow from another field, there's a great 1969 interview with Charles Eames [1] (famed furniture designer) in which he discusses design, and constraints as being a necessary component of design. A pleasure to read. Excerpts: Interviewer: Does the creation of Design admit constraint? Eames: Design depends largely on constraints. Interviewer: What constraints? Eames: The sum of all constraints. Here is one of the f…

Eames's views towards design helped me better make peace with accepting constraints and working with them as part of the medium.

Also, their interview set in a beautiful layout by House Ind, sure did help drive the point better - http://eames.houseind.com/objects/catalog.html

It might still be freely available as a catalog to those interested in their products. I highly recommend that one.

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