Imaginary problems are the root of bad software • Hacker News Board

Aeolun wrote: post #381

Denzel wrote: post #370

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You’re working from a cost-efficiency / cost optimization perspective. That’s a great perspective in some contexts, for example, mature late-stage products, fully saturated markets, etc. Is cost efficiency an effective perspective for innovation or revenue growth? Mostly, no. As long as your risk-of-ruin is low, then you want to fail. Sometimes people misinterpret this as “doing the wrong thing”. But it takes doing a…

You ask the executive if he wants to get to his goal with a team of 200 after lighting on fire 20M, or with a team of 20 after paying 2M. Ultimately you end up in the same spot, but one choice is fairly suboptimal there.

The whole point of the comment you replied to is that, if the "goal" is something innovative rather than just sustaining, then no, you don't end up in the same spot in those two scenarios.

But this is why some executives are better for some kinds of businesses and others are better for other kinds. Some executives don't understand your parent comment's point (or just don't find it comfortable), and will be very allergic to the "waste" necessary to experiment and iterate on poorly understood projects. Other executives will be uncomfortable just constantly figuring out how to optimize costs without damaging revenues.

A very tricky part of the lifecycle of many companies that get gigantic is to figure out when to flip this and start switching out the executive team to focus on a different model.