Never attribute to stupidity what is adequately explained by opportunity cost
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Re: Never attribute to stupidity what is adequately explained by opportunity cost
#2Like when I asked my friend when we were kids: why don't you have money? And he said we have money, but it's for something else. I said well what could be more important than this? (Forgot what "this" was, most probably a new PC.)
Re: Never attribute to stupidity what is adequately explained by opportunity cost
#3This rings really true with my experience at a startup. Everyone involved in the product could see it's weaknesses, we just didn't have the manpower to change them.
I've definitely fallen into the "attribute to malice/stupidity" trap as well, even when I know that the people responsible are working flat out, if you're not in the trenches it's so easy to say "but it's so simple! I could do it in an hour". It's something you have to constantly keep in check.
Honestly, I think the prioritisation thing is absolutely the most important thing any team or company can do. The person working on a feature almost never has the overall context to accurately prioritise. The next feature or bug on whatever they're working on will always feel more important than someone else's problem. Building a working environment which empowers people to work towards a common goal - and not just whatever feels important to them in the moment - is really hard.
Re: Never attribute to stupidity what is adequately explained by opportunity cost
#4I usually find that when I have to go "why is this the way it is, that's stupid!" I usually end up finding out that there is (sometimes was) some design constraint I wasn't aware of that caused to to need to be that way, and actually it makes sense.
Re: Never attribute to stupidity what is adequately explained by opportunity cost
#5If something is more valuable than the opportunity costs it is stupidity not to pursue it .If something is less valuable than the opportunity cost it is stupid to mention.
Re: Never attribute to stupidity what is adequately explained by opportunity cost
#6This is such an important concept. I was just explaining this to product/leadership the other week:
"It's not a matter of convincing me we should do this. Obviously, we should. But we also have a hundred other things that we should do, and a few dozen things that we need to do. So it's not a discussion of 'should we'; it's a discussion of understanding how important this thing is in relation to all of the other things."
Triage and prioritization is hard.
Re: Never attribute to stupidity what is adequately explained by opportunity cost
#7> I've found that neither malice nor stupidity is the most common reason when you don't understand why something is in a certain way. Instead, the root cause is probably just that they didn't have time yet.
Ok, let's leave security for later!
Re: Never attribute to stupidity what is adequately explained by opportunity cost
#8You often hear people in engineering teams say something to the effect of "I can't understand why this was built this way. It's been done stupidly", but invariably there's some key piece of contextual information that's missing like, as you say, there simply wasn't enough time.
I also wrote about this recently: https://timwhite.digital/building-software-sharing-knowledge
Re: Never attribute to stupidity what is adequately explained by opportunity cost
#9"It might seem obvious the way I put it that opportunity cost is the thing to blame. But it's not."
You just have to look at the k8s hype to see that it's not.
In this industry, I often have the feeling that people are fetishizing complex solutions even if the problem at hand doesn't require them.
But I have to admit, it's not easy to focus on the problem space and really work out what is needed. Most people do too much or not enough.
Re: Never attribute to stupidity what is adequately explained by opportunity cost
#10Similarly, people sometimes don't change their opinion on an issue - not because they're stupid, but because changing your mind about something takes work, work takes resources, and these resources are already invested in something you perceive as important.