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Opportunity Sizing: Is the Juice Worth the Squeeze?

blog.harterrt.com

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Re: Opportunity Sizing: Is the Juice Worth the Squeeze?

#21

Post by harterrt »

tziki wrote: post #8

Something like this should be part of every engineering curriculum. As a small anecdote, I've several times ran into engineers who spent inordinate amounts of time to make the system just a tiny bit more type safer, and when I ask how many bugs would this have fixed during the last year they don't know. When I do the work and send them the single, low-impact bug their efforts would've fixed, they still go through men…

Thanks for the note! Doing opportunity sizing early in the product life-cycle definitely helps with this type of situation. Though, I've found it only really helps when it's a forward looking analysis or (rarely) when part of a no-blame retrospective.

Re: Opportunity Sizing: Is the Juice Worth the Squeeze?

#22

Post by harterrt »

bcherny wrote: post #2

This is one of those “Product Management 101” things that engineers are surprisingly bad at. I couldn’t agree more that this is an essential skill for engineers (especially sr engineers), whether they’re working on infra, growth, or product.

Thanks for the note and I'm glad the piece was useful!

Re: Opportunity Sizing: Is the Juice Worth the Squeeze?

#23

Post by nexuist »

dale_glass wrote: post #9
dandellion wrote: post #3

I wonder if this kind of reasoning might be why Mozilla keeps dropping features of Firefox I liked such as RSS, bookmark descriptions, FTP, while adding stuff I don't care about like Pocket and Hello. I've recently finally caved in and installed Chromium and Brave, to see if they might be worth switching because of the reasons I had for using Firefox are just not there any more. After 15 years using Firefox (and advo…

That's funny, because I remember Firefox starting as "Phoenix", a very lightweight browser free from the bloat of Netscape. I also don't quite get people's attachment to FTP. FTP has always been a horrible protocol and only relatively tolerable back before the Internet got so widespread. The moment one went from a modem to say, DSL, one would quickly bump into the horrors of FTP under NAT. And even before then, FTP s…

> FTP is clearly a protocol made for command-line comfort

GUIs did not exist when FTP was made. Frankly, the concept of user accounts didn't either, so the anonymous access hack was a product of its time and not an intentional design decision.

I am confused though, because FTP being a protocol means it is fairly standardized in terms of commands and expected output right? Are there FTP servers that spat out wildly different responses to typical commands? Because if so, SMTP/POP3 should suffer from the same thing, but I don't recall many email client developers complaining about it.

Re: Opportunity Sizing: Is the Juice Worth the Squeeze?

#24

Post by dale_glass »

nexuist wrote: post #23
dale_glass wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's funny, because I remember Firefox starting as "Phoenix", a very lightweight browser free from the bloat of Netscape. I also don't quite get people's attachment to FTP. FTP has always been a horrible protocol and only relatively tolerable back before the Internet got so widespread. The moment one went from a modem to say, DSL, one would quickly bump into the horrors of FTP under NAT. And even before then, FTP s…

> FTP is clearly a protocol made for command-line comfort GUIs did not exist when FTP was made. Frankly, the concept of user accounts didn't either, so the anonymous access hack was a product of its time and not an intentional design decision. I am confused though, because FTP being a protocol means it is fairly standardized in terms of commands and expected output right? Are there FTP servers that spat out wildly di…

FTP's directory listing command provides the output of 'ls'. Or 'dir', if on Windows. Or a bunch of other variations.

That's because it was made to be shown to a human using a commandline client, and wasn't intended to be parsed. As a result, a FTP client like Firefox needs to parse about a dozen possible versions, plus there's a standard for actual machine-readable listings that may still not be universally supported.

Anonymous access was typically announced in the welcome message, with something along the lines of "Login as user ftp, pass ftp for anonymous access". Again, made for humans reading that.

And besides that, it has annoying design quirks like that "download done" is just closing the socket.

My point is that FTP is a remarkably annoying protocol for something like Firefox to implement. It involves figuring out how to parse stuff that wasn't made to be parsed, guessing common anonymous account names and passwords, and dealing with ASCII/binary active/passive modes. The nature of a program like Firefox clashes with the protocol badly.

Proper GUI clients show all the messages the FTP server is producing because sometimes it's just a necessity. It's always possible that there will be something the client won't be able to deal with automatically.

Re: Opportunity Sizing: Is the Juice Worth the Squeeze?

#25

Post by spacemanmatt »

nexuist wrote: post #23
dale_glass wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's funny, because I remember Firefox starting as "Phoenix", a very lightweight browser free from the bloat of Netscape. I also don't quite get people's attachment to FTP. FTP has always been a horrible protocol and only relatively tolerable back before the Internet got so widespread. The moment one went from a modem to say, DSL, one would quickly bump into the horrors of FTP under NAT. And even before then, FTP s…

> FTP is clearly a protocol made for command-line comfort GUIs did not exist when FTP was made. Frankly, the concept of user accounts didn't either, so the anonymous access hack was a product of its time and not an intentional design decision. I am confused though, because FTP being a protocol means it is fairly standardized in terms of commands and expected output right? Are there FTP servers that spat out wildly di…

If you were a user of FTP/SMTP/POP3 software in the 90s, you definitely saw a regular stream of developer/operator complaints. The last 20 years saw a lot of diversity loss in popular protocols (DIEDIEDIE!) and we now use a narrow subset of them.

Re: Opportunity Sizing: Is the Juice Worth the Squeeze?

#26

Post by coolgeek »

harterrt - I hope you're still reading this...

This is a really good (initial) framework for thinking about what new features should or should not be built.

But I would advise against using it (alone) as a tool for deciding which existing features should be removed (as other readers suggest may be happening).

With new features, it's a binary choice - build or not.

With existing features, there is a third choice - continue development, stop development (but maintain), or remove feature. Removing features has costs that might not be worth the savings.

Google lost a lot of goodwill over the last few years by unceremoniously dropping products. Mozilla, over the last year or so, seems to be making some of the same mistakes.

Chromium is terrible enough that users don't really have an alternative - at the moment. But goodwill is really hard to get back after it's been squandered.

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