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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

#151

Post by danaris »

Ifkaluva wrote: post #145
sidewndr46 wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Day 1: We aim to demonstrate the effectiveness of an existing industrial catalyst in a novel application that has not seen commercial usage, potentially lowering cost of production of precursors for essential medications Day 400: Having thoroughly described a universal theory of everything, we set out to build an experimental apparatus in orbit at a Lagrange point capable of detecting a universal particle which acts…

I think it’s the opposite—you start out bright eyed and busy tailed thinking you will do something big over the next five years… You find out your idea has been tried, five different ways, all of them failed. Two of your follow up ideas were already done, and had some impact but not as much as expected. Finally you have an idea nobody has done, you try it and it flops—maybe somebody had tried it before but their resu…

I mean, part of the systemic problem here is that "results were so bad they couldn't publish."

That shouldn't ever be a thing. As long as your methods are sound, it should never matter whether your results are just completely random noise; that's still an important result.

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

#152

Post by strogonoff »

YZF wrote: post #136
strogonoff wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

In a way, simplifying the judgement call to the black-and-white approach “either you change all instances or none” without considering nuance is also a way of managing the mental overhead. Making a simple call lets you spend all your nuance energy in areas where it might matter more.

I agree that it’s also a way of accumulating technical debt, it’s all a bit of a tradeoff.

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

#153

Post by stathibus »

lazyasciiart wrote: post #106
stathibus wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Focus on finishing. Reduce the scope as much as possible again. in my field this would be terrible advice. instead you need to be doing something that your audience actually will give a shit about.

If you’ve spent a significant amount of time widening the scope as far as possible to include everything interesting about your original question, and there is nothing in that whole widened scope that the audience will give a shit about, your topic is unsaveable and your advisor is a failure. If there is something interesting enough to qualify, then reduce the scope as much as possible. It should go without saying th…

The problem that occurs in practice is “focus on finishing” leads people to finish without actually doing anything meaningful. Advisors may or may not encourage this depending on where they are in their career.

When you get on the industry job market nobody cares if it took you 3 years or 7 years to do the work, they only care if it’s meaningful.

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

#154

Post by Ifkaluva »

danaris wrote: post #151
Ifkaluva wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it’s the opposite—you start out bright eyed and busy tailed thinking you will do something big over the next five years… You find out your idea has been tried, five different ways, all of them failed. Two of your follow up ideas were already done, and had some impact but not as much as expected. Finally you have an idea nobody has done, you try it and it flops—maybe somebody had tried it before but their resu…

I mean, part of the systemic problem here is that "results were so bad they couldn't publish." That shouldn't ever be a thing. As long as your methods are sound, it should never matter whether your results are just completely random noise; that's still an important result.

Right :) I was trying to write the bleakest possible version, and in the bleakest, your own unpublished idea is not actually original, it’s just a failure of the system to record negative results.

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

#155

Post by tyleo »

shimman wrote: post #141
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…

Yes, why would teams of a company prefer shorter less risky projects to look better in front of the person that controls their livelihoods on whether they become homeless or die due to lack of health insurance next sprint? Totally realistic and honest outlooks that are replicable throughout all swaths of industry really.

You may be surprised but I’ve seen a lot of teams that seem to bias towards building the more complex thing.

I think calculating this sort of tradeoff is part of the skillset engineers tend to lack.

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

#156

Post by tra3 »

isjdkwjdown wrote: post #144
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".

> "impediment to action advances action. what stands in the way, becomes the way". Don’t know where this is from but it’s like saying “when you stop work in progress, progress is stopped”, I mean, sure. That’s how things go, but why even say such an obvious fact of life?

to me it's, it's about framing.

before, things that would block me were acts of an unkind universe. I'm exaggerating for effect here. These days, I look at obstacles more like an opportunity. Does this make sense?

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

#157

Post by sidewndr46 »

dnnddidiej wrote: post #109
sidewndr46 wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Day 1: We aim to demonstrate the effectiveness of an existing industrial catalyst in a novel application that has not seen commercial usage, potentially lowering cost of production of precursors for essential medications Day 400: Having thoroughly described a universal theory of everything, we set out to build an experimental apparatus in orbit at a Lagrange point capable of detecting a universal particle which acts…

This comment is screaming out fot 3 or 4 panels and some stick figures.

feel free to expand upon it, I'm not an artist.

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

#158

Post by shimman »

tyleo wrote: post #155
shimman wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, why would teams of a company prefer shorter less risky projects to look better in front of the person that controls their livelihoods on whether they become homeless or die due to lack of health insurance next sprint? Totally realistic and honest outlooks that are replicable throughout all swaths of industry really.

You may be surprised but I’ve seen a lot of teams that seem to bias towards building the more complex thing. I think calculating this sort of tradeoff is part of the skillset engineers tend to lack.

Yes, why would teams want to build a complex thing where they can claim tribal knowledge while building up their fiefs? Truly there is no junk incentive here, people just WANT complexity. No ulterior motives to be found!
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