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Sabotaging projects by overthinking, scope creep, and structural diffing

kevinlynagh.com

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Re: Sabotaging projects by overthinking, scope creep, and structural diffing

#131

Post by biophysboy »

wasabi991011 wrote: post #8
bennettnate5 wrote: post #5

Incidentally, this describes what I believe to be the great difficulty of PhD research. You have to take a topic you find interesting and read all possible related work in it, which tends to result in significant scope creep as you realize just how much there is that already does you want to do. Having exhausted your initial energy and excitement for the project, you have to force yourself the remaining 20-30% of he…

Oh man I feel that in my bones. Any advice on how to mitigate this?

I finished a PhD. My concrete advice is focus on feasible methods you know are realistic for your lab resource wise (time, money, etc)

Re: Sabotaging projects by overthinking, scope creep, and structural diffing

#132

Post by Jemaclus »

YZF wrote: post #115
tyleo wrote: post #32

Our CEO at Rec Room put this a way I really like, "Teams are always telling me they wish they did shorter projects. I've almost never heard a team say, 'we wish we delayed launch, did something more complex, polished more'" I don't think it holds in 100% of situations but I do think if you're going to make an error one way or the other, I'd rather do something smaller and release too early than do something bigger an…

There's features and there is quality and there is domain. I worked on a team that built high precision industrial machinery. The team and the project manager decided to delay shipping because there were still problems. We delayed, fixed the problems, and the machine worked really well and was used for at least a decade. If we'd had shipped it too soon we would have to try and fix it at a remote site and likely it wo…

Ah, but you're talking about something else: hardware is quite different from software. Once your machine is out in the wild, you can't update it remotely. But with software, shipping MVPs and iterating is not only possible, it's almost always the right way to go about it.

I frequently tell my software teams "We aren't putting rockets in space; we're shipping an admin panel. We can revert code or change things if we don't like it."

Re: Sabotaging projects by overthinking, scope creep, and structural diffing

#133

Post by SoftTalker »

bennettnate5 wrote: post #5

Incidentally, this describes what I believe to be the great difficulty of PhD research. You have to take a topic you find interesting and read all possible related work in it, which tends to result in significant scope creep as you realize just how much there is that already does you want to do. Having exhausted your initial energy and excitement for the project, you have to force yourself the remaining 20-30% of he…

This is why so many research papers have "Towards" as the first word in the title. I.e. we didn't actually achieve our original goal, but here's a writeup of what progress we made.

I heard academic research described like this: Imagine yourself inside a balloon. The body of research in your field is represented by the current size of the balloon. Now put your fingertip on the wall of the balloon and push. That little indentation is your Ph.D.

Another analogy is a lake: The lake is the current body of research, you walk up and dump in an additional bucket of water. That's your Ph.D.

I'm sure there are many others.

Re: Sabotaging projects by overthinking, scope creep, and structural diffing

#134

Post by BobbyTables2 »

bennettnate5 wrote: post #5

Incidentally, this describes what I believe to be the great difficulty of PhD research. You have to take a topic you find interesting and read all possible related work in it, which tends to result in significant scope creep as you realize just how much there is that already does you want to do. Having exhausted your initial energy and excitement for the project, you have to force yourself the remaining 20-30% of he…

I feel one also has to have a drive for “marketing” their idea and that is 50% of the PhD. Or at least a blind enthusiasm that they are doing something significantly better than previous work.

How else does one stand up and proclaim that the fruits of years of labor and expense of a small fortune is an incremental improvement ?

While working on a project for a class, I once found a solution to a particular problem that hadn’t been really solved. Got to do a conference poster. Someone asked if it was my PhD topic (it wasn’t). I felt it was too silly to even count toward such. The problem likely had not been unsolved because very few ever cared.

(I eventually dropped out)

Instead I write software mostly with no UI that nobody ever sees. But I enjoy the work and can convince myself that someone finds it useful.

Re: Sabotaging projects by overthinking, scope creep, and structural diffing

#135

Post by polalavik »

tra3 wrote: post #34

In one of his speeches, Obama said "Better is good". I think about this a lot. It feels like better compounds over time, too. Small improvements add up. From experience, nothing new is perfect the first go round, so sitting around trying to come up with a perfect design is counterproductive because there's no such thing. "impediment to action advances action. what stands in the way, becomes the way".

slow is smooth, smooth is fast

Re: Sabotaging projects by overthinking, scope creep, and structural diffing

#136

Post by YZF »

strogonoff wrote: post #122
YZF wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had something similar but convinced the other person the rest of the work can be done later. Then the person went ahead and did it despite the other instances having no use/value. Go figure. I guess having consistency has some value to argue the other side. I tend to be extremely flexible in terms of allowing different ways of doing things but some seem to confuse form with function insisting on some "perfection" i…

Consistency reduces the mental cost of acquiring and maintaining an understanding of a system. In a real sense, moving from one approach to two different approaches, even if one of them is slightly better than the original one, can be a downgrade.

Like many other things it's a judgement call. The break down occurs when people replace judgement with rules or "religion". This tends to happen when they don't have the experience of seeing the long term impact of decisions in various contexts.

Re: Sabotaging projects by overthinking, scope creep, and structural diffing

#137

Post by sunrunner »

SoftTalker wrote: post #133
bennettnate5 wrote: post #5

Incidentally, this describes what I believe to be the great difficulty of PhD research. You have to take a topic you find interesting and read all possible related work in it, which tends to result in significant scope creep as you realize just how much there is that already does you want to do. Having exhausted your initial energy and excitement for the project, you have to force yourself the remaining 20-30% of he…

This is why so many research papers have "Towards" as the first word in the title. I.e. we didn't actually achieve our original goal, but here's a writeup of what progress we made. I heard academic research described like this: Imagine yourself inside a balloon. The body of research in your field is represented by the current size of the balloon. Now put your fingertip on the wall of the balloon and push. That little…

> That little indentation is your Ph.D.

Illustrated nicely by https://matt.might.net/articles/phd-school-in-pictures/

Re: Sabotaging projects by overthinking, scope creep, and structural diffing

#138

Post by lynaghk »

SuperSixFour wrote: post #97

The fact that the author was confident enough to start the article with a picture of the bins they made and they include seemingly 3x the same thing (oats) and an entire container of ice cream cones, while the only actual ingredient they have is flour and its at the end, makes me question the validity of their argument

The last bin is whey protein powder.

Re: Sabotaging projects by overthinking, scope creep, and structural diffing

#139

Post by orochimaaru »

sunrunner wrote: post #137
SoftTalker wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is why so many research papers have "Towards" as the first word in the title. I.e. we didn't actually achieve our original goal, but here's a writeup of what progress we made. I heard academic research described like this: Imagine yourself inside a balloon. The body of research in your field is represented by the current size of the balloon. Now put your fingertip on the wall of the balloon and push. That little…

> That little indentation is your Ph.D. Illustrated nicely by https://matt.might.net/articles/phd-school-in-pictures/

Lol. That one. I wish I had seen that before I began my PhD. It describes the anti-climactic and exhilarating feeling you have simultaneously at your thesis defense.

Re: Sabotaging projects by overthinking, scope creep, and structural diffing

#140

Post by sovenyr »

giladd wrote: post #19

> Perhaps there’s some kind of conservation law here: Any increases in programming speed will be offset by a corresponding increase in unnecessary features, rabbit holes, and diversions. This resonates hard. LLMs enable true perfectionism, the ability to completely fulfil your vision for a project. This lets you add many features without burning out due to fatigue or boredom. However (as the author points out), most…

The flip side is that "fulfil your vision" requires actually having a vision before each session. Without explicit scope set upfront, the LLM defaults to filling time with adjacent improvements that feel like progress.

  I've started writing a one-line success criterion before opening the editor, the way @sambaumann's parent comment hints at — "the failure-mode-resistant version of this task is X." Not because the LLM can't figure out what I want, but because if I can't compress the goal to one        
  sentence, I'm not actually ready to build, I'm ready to wander.                                                                                                                                                                                                                               
                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                
  The scope creep cure pre-LLM was fatigue. Now fatigue takes much longer to kick in, so the cure has to be cognitive instead.
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