Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

How to Ruin Your Company With One Bad Process

bhorowitz.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 93 posts

Re: How to Ruin Your Company With One Bad Process

#51

Post by inthewoods »

AndrewKemendo wrote: post #14

Interesting article for sure and I think it highlights exactly how you get unwanted bloat and how to prevent it. Budgeting has always been a dark art, especially for creative work, and adding smart constraints on the front end are some ways to reign things in - however I think this largely applies to the companies who can say the following: "we had plenty of cash in the bank." I know for us our budgeting process is,…

I really like the article, but I don't see any connection between the lyric and the article. For me, if you're going to use a quote to lead off an article, it needs to setup the article. This lyric adds nothing for me (and I'm a hip-hop head).

Re: How to Ruin Your Company With One Bad Process

#52

Post by Terr_ »

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…

It applies to games too! When customization is too granular, all players' configurations converge on a few min/maxed builds.

Constraints (e.g. player class systems) reduce the raw number of choices you can make, but the ones left behind are more interesting and meaningful.

Re: How to Ruin Your Company With One Bad Process

#53

Post by ArkyBeagle »

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…

Plus-one - constraints are absolutely vital. I'd say the absence of constraints has killed more projects as I have seen. It's difficult to determine wants v.s. need without some thinking, and constraints help with that.

Re: How to Ruin Your Company With One Bad Process

#54

Post by est »

carbocation wrote: post #25
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…

Constraints gave us Facebook instead of Myspace. Constraints gave us Twitter. Constraints gave us Snapchat. Social networks have thrived on obvious constraints. When looking for a startup idea, sometimes I try to reimagine a popular tool or service with additional constraints.

and no-constraints gave us 4chan.

Re: How to Ruin Your Company With One Bad Process

#55

Post by Chronic29 »

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…

Cool

Re: How to Ruin Your Company With One Bad Process

#56

Post by ojbyrne »

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…

As a student of management (once upon a time) what I found to be one of the more interesting paradigms was the Theory of Constraints: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_Constraints

Re: How to Ruin Your Company With One Bad Process

#57

Post by duncanawoods »

ojbyrne wrote: post #56
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…

As a student of management (once upon a time) what I found to be one of the more interesting paradigms was the Theory of Constraints: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_Constraints

I recently read "The Goal", may I ask what you found interesting about TOC?

As far as I could see, it seemed to boil down to finding and fixing bottlenecks. Focusing on the critical paths in a process whether project schedules or chip designs is just par for the course. I don't know whether I missed something.

Re: How to Ruin Your Company With One Bad Process

#58

Post by Xylakant »

est wrote: post #54
carbocation wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Constraints gave us Facebook instead of Myspace. Constraints gave us Twitter. Constraints gave us Snapchat. Social networks have thrived on obvious constraints. When looking for a startup idea, sometimes I try to reimagine a popular tool or service with additional constraints.

and no-constraints gave us 4chan.

It's entirely not true that no-contraints gave us 4chan. 4chan is definitely constrained: In manpower and financials. Every time the 4chan people post a clever hack that makes 4chan work with what they have, I'm impressed. The fact that they don't filter the content doesn't mean that there are no constraints to the system. The constraints are just different from facebook and myspace.

Re: How to Ruin Your Company With One Bad Process

#59

Post by atesti »

est wrote: post #54
carbocation wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Constraints gave us Facebook instead of Myspace. Constraints gave us Twitter. Constraints gave us Snapchat. Social networks have thrived on obvious constraints. When looking for a startup idea, sometimes I try to reimagine a popular tool or service with additional constraints.

and no-constraints gave us 4chan.

4chan has constraints: There are only 20 pages per board (if I recall correctly) and if a thread does not get new posts and drops from page 20, it's gone forever. Just like the twitter 140 characters limit, 4chan has a history limit.

So 4chan perfectly fits in the parent's list of social network like things based on arbitrary contraints

Re: How to Ruin Your Company With One Bad Process

#60

Post by fela »

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…

I agree that having constrains makes the problem simpler to think about, which as a programmer/engineer is great. It makes the problem look more like a puzzle.

However the truth is that constrains can be broken as long as you realize that doing so has a cost. Taking this into account expands the solutions space hugely, which both means that if you can take advantage of this you might find overall better solutions, while at the same time it can be overwhelming and paralyzing.

Edit to add: sometimes when the solutions space is too big artificially and arbitrarily limiting it might help.

Post reply on HN