Many companies I have worked for operate like this. Engineers get to work on shiny new features, they get released, everyone is happy. Months later tons of bugs accumulate. The original authors are already part of another team (because “breaking silos”, but actually because “make everyone replaceable”). The engineers that inherit the project need to maintain it and fix the bugs until another team takes over.
It’s awful.
Such is the hellscape we’ve brought on ourselves from the widespread adoption of “minimum viable product” as the right way to build things. We judge viability by some feature set, not whether the stupid thing is resilient or can be maintained.
It also doesn’t help that “minimum viable” is only one step away from “non-viable”. Every project then becomes like Icarus, testing how close to the sun we can fly before our wings melt.
But what's the alternative here? "We spent longer than was minimally viable but we still don't have a good idea if it has market fit"-product? In my experience the code usually gets binned whether the idea gets traction or not. Some companies misjudge when to rewrite, but that doesn't make the MVP part of the process wrong.
The absolute greatest wastes of talent and humanity I've ever seen in tech didn't come from tech debt, those efforts were almost always at least working on a product that people were paying money for. The biggest wastes were from over-delivering products that hadn't and were never going to succeed.
A portion of “product-market fit” failures are actually software quality failures. I think it’s easy to blame the ensh*ttification of software on corporate incompetence, but I think “minimally viable” is part of the story as well.
The world we have now where everything is built to be thrown away, including software, has had the side-effect of destroying craftsmanship. And I'm becoming more convinced as I age that the world is poorer for it.
Hard agree with the last sentence. We’re capable of greatness, im optimistic for new generation products. Not all humans are bad. Cycles and such
In the context of the topmost comment, the alternative is “don’t stop at MVP”.
If you make an MVP and end up discarding it shortly after, that’s fine, and completely appropriate for an MVP.
OTOH, MVP may not be sufficient for something that the business still relies on day in, day out months or years down the road.
"Temporary" frequently become permanent.
If it didn't get traction someone defined badly what was the MVP. As it wasn't viable. The M gives the idea of a minimal feature set or low effort but it shouldn't, a MVP now that competition is high needs much more quality and features than a decade ago
I don’t think MVPs are the problem here. Most projects were like this before MVPs were conceived of. Usually the failure is that the project isn’t minimal at all. It’s usually the maximum complexity that a given team can handle.
I often joke that every startup job post Series A is you playing Viscera Cleanup Detail[1] for the "heroes" of the pre-PMF stage
[1]: https://store.steampowered.com/app/246900/Viscera_Cleanup_De...
What a jargon-rich sentence. No idea what you wrote.
I often joke that every startup job post <<getting lots of funding>> is you playing <<game about cleaning up gore>> for the <<people who made the MVP>> of the <<before getting lots of funding>> stage.
Thanks.
having been the original author on a company defining feature and then told that the silo must be broken only to see my work stepped on for years to come i wholeheartedly agree. the inheritors not qualified to make the decisions, my grand ideas pushed to the side, and having watched the incompetance in managing said feature has been a hard thing to overcome and im still salty about it every time a stupid bug arises. especially when warnings were raised with ample time to adjust. but i learned an important lesson and i can say with certaintly that i wont hesitate to be perceived as an asshole and die on hills about it the next time
The current state is like an internal, employee-level Not Invented Here.
completely correct, but I dont think thats where OP is coming from or what the article intends to suggest either. Its recommending that you try multiple things, get a feel for whats technically feasible & if it looks interesting to the customer and push that forward. Its very well applicable to indie devs & also applicable to large companies to some extent. This philosophy is great to identify the feature/product you want to spend meaningful time on.
In fact, one could wager that the situation you described is directly a consequence of not adhering to what OP is suggesting.
One of the things I like about my current project is that more than half of the original team have stuck with it after we went live. The work itself is, admittedly, a bit less interesting, but it’s rewarding in a different way.
What you're describing doesn't seem to relate to the post at all.
I drew a comparison between “iterate and fail fast” vs “lots of upfront design” as a personal process, rather than a company’s modus operandi. For instance someone might do 2 or 3 prototypes when tasked with delivering a certain feature in order to explore the problem space.
Google?
This post really resonated with me, as I have between a dozen and a hundred abandoned projects, mostly games, since I started programming around 1989. Most of them written for the Mac Plus or Mac LC. And many of them following a similar mechanic or art style to the ones in the post.
I think of the few shipped projects I've released or been part of as a shadow of who I am. Same with my resume and work experience. They're a fingerprint of a whole being living a dream life that never manifested, because I never had an early win to build upon. That's why I think UBI might magnify human potential by 10 or 100 fold, to get us from the service economy to agency and self-actualization, producing our own residual incomes.
Oh and I played Pararena a ton!
I do have a different opinion to you, and it was formed during the pandemic when there were UBI-like circumstances for me and my friend group. Those who didn't need to work any more, became rather depressed, quite quickly, compared to those who kept working. And it changed my view on UBI. Maybe in your friend group that was different or your country didn't follow such an approach?
What's the difference between working on several games or focusing and finished one to you?
Would you work on these things enough to produce finished projects if you had UBI? For more than a while?
I think at some life stages, like parenthood or childhood, UBI makes sense. At others, when you are finding yourself - having a responsibility is useful.
> Those who didn't need to work any more, became rather depressed, quite quickly, compared to those who kept working.
I'm going to be completely honest with you, I really think you need to consider other reasons why people might be depressed in the situation that occurred during the pandemic. I don't know anyone who was doing particularly well, including those working (heck, people at my job at the time were struggling pretty badly with mental health to the point where they started reaching out to us.)
I'm not even saying this as a person that has a strong opinion on UBI, and I am sure some people sincerely believe not having a job was a major detriment for them. I absolutely think it did help me, but the way I see it, it helped because it was something to cling onto for a bit of normalcy, and of course, a bit of social interaction. Outside of the pandemic, a job is not nearly as critical for those two things.
I also do personally think that I still broadly like having a job, and I have had almost no gaps in employment since I started working professionally. That said, if money were no object, I would absolutely take breaks off of professional work for months at a time. For me, I find both professional work and hobby work important in very different ways, and wish I had dedicated time for both. Anecdotally I've definitely known engineers who periodically take months or even a year off of work when they get the opportunity and it seems to be a very healthy thing for them.
The existence of UBI would maybe tempt people to rely on it even if it is detrimental to their lives, but I think it's wrong to draw the conclusion that it's bad because jobs can be a source of fulfillment for many. In the future it's very possible we're going to need to approach the problem from another angle anyways, since there's simply no guarantee there will be meaningful work for us all in the future. (I'm not really convinced there won't be, but it feels unreasonable to consider it outside the realm of reasonable possibility.)
> I don't know anyone who was doing particularly well, including those working...
I and many others did great. I think someone should do a study of the experiences of introverts vs extroverts and you'll find the latter suffered more and many of the former had a better quality of life as a result.
Working from home was simply a huge boost for many. We suddenly found more time to do our personal projects. Got to work less without dropping productivity etc.
As an introvert who fell quickly into depression at the start of the pandemic, I'm having a very difficult time seeing this comment as anything but gaslighting.
EDIT: Instead of trying to persuade you that the pandemic was a bad thing, I'll just say that perhaps your wonderful work-from home experience was different than a lot of other people.
> Instead of trying to persuade you that the pandemic was a bad thing
Never said it wasn't. I lost people I know to COVID.
> I'll just say that perhaps your wonderful work-from home experience was different than a lot of other people.
I'm not denying that either.
I think you're misreading my comment as saying "For the majority of introverts, it was better than before". I am not asserting any such thing. I am saying that for some, it was better.
You just need to scan HN comments from that time period to find plenty of people who enjoyed their work from home experience during the pandemic.
BTW, I refused to work from home prior to the pandemic. At times I made it a condition of employment that I leave my laptop at work when I went home. So this is definitely not coming from a guy who always liked working from home. When I had to, though, I found the experience to be far superior than commuting every day and dealing with nosy managers.
I think you are missing my point. Actually, ever since the pandemic, I prefer WFH/remote work. I mean, I actually did like working in an office for reasons, but there's no doubt about it: I am an introvert.
But being an introvert didn't fix anything else. I had to constantly cycle through masks, got harassed by random strangers when going to the store, had my medical appointments delayed for several months, people I knew were dying, there were shortages of basically everything, and the news cycle was full of panic and anger. And the pre-existing problems with the Internet somehow got even worse.
Maybe it's because I live in a rural area, but life here really was great. The impact of the pandemic was really confined to prices increasing. Nobody really got that sick in my community. We all sort of just spent WAAAAYYYY more time with each other.
As long as we avoided the news.
> I had to constantly cycle through masks
I'll grant they were a pain. I don't miss them. They didn't make my life miserable, though.
> got harassed by random strangers when going to the store
Why? Not my experience at all (unless you were refusing to wear a mask).
> had my medical appointments delayed for several months
I can see that being a major problem if you have medical conditions.
> people I knew were dying
Same here. It definitely sucked, but I didn't get depressed by it. I think it comes down to expectations in life. If you go through life thinking "people in their 30s aren't supposed to die", then yes, I can see it being depressing. If you go through life with "one can die any time - be it from disease or a car accident", then a pandemic isn't much of a shock.
To give a different perspective: Long before the pandemic, people I knew died in places like Palestine and Iraq due to conflicts. Yet the whole world lived a happy life despite it. Is this all that different?
And go back a century or more, and people around you dying from disease was the norm (think tuberculosis, etc). That didn't prevent people from having a happy life, and did not make them depressed. It's not (primarily) the circumstances that lead to the depression, but the narrative one has around them.
> there were shortages of basically everything
I got lucky. We happened to accidentally buy an extra set of Clorox wipes just prior to the pandemic. We were going to return them and then the pandemic hit. I was never short.
Hand sanitizer shortages sucked. We certainly conserved our use, and were fortunate never to run out.
As for everything else, I didn't deal with any serious shortages. Somehow always found paper towels, bathroom rolls, soap, etc. And things like cars/appliance shortages - these are not meaningful quality of life things for me.
> and the news cycle was full of panic and anger
If this caused you depression, I say this with the utmost sincerity: I hope you learned the lesson not to waste much time with the news. I was a news junkie for many years, and had cured myself of it years before the pandemic hit (and thankfully never jumped on the social media bandwagon). Video news is the worst, and has almost no redeeming value. You can get much, much more from text sources.
At the end of the day, it wasn't the pandemic but the news media that caused you problems.
> And the pre-existing problems with the Internet somehow got even worse.
I guess I'm fortunate in that my Internet never had problems.
The other obvious difference between you and me: You seem to have experience with remote work prior to the pandemic, so your baseline was clearly different. For people like me, the pandemic was the cause of my appreciating remote work.
BTW, I'm not claiming it was great for the majority. Merely pointing out that for many - albeit a minority - it was an improvement on life.
Being able to go for walks on days of nice weather in nice neighborhoods during work hours can be a major improvement on one's mood.
There is not doubt in my mind that if we somehow implemented a UBI in a way that would not just result in inflation of rent and everyday goods, the vast majority of people would simply stop working, get bored, depressed, and more likely go looking for mischief before they started working on useful or interesting hobby projects.
Whats more, if you drop out of work to live on the UBI, by definition, you are the poorest person in the country, and if that is not a reason to be depressed I don't know what is.
> There is not doubt in my mind that if we somehow implemented a UBI in a way that would not just result in inflation of rent and everyday goods, the vast majority of people would simply stop working, get bored, depressed, and more likely go looking for mischief before they started working on useful or interesting hobby projects.
I've taken quite a bit of time off between jobs and lived off minimal savings (over a year several times now) and I've experienced exactly what you describe - the boredom and depression. However, I also came out the other side and now I wish this for everyone.
The boredom and depression was because I was operating from the typical mode of being where there was a belief that my only value was that which I could provide to society. This was a belief that's indoctrinated in us from a very young age - through school, grades, parents, and work.
Once this belief fell away, a new kind of motivation has opened up - the curiosity I felt as a kid to create and explore and experiment and follow my interest. The joy of simply being alive, being allowed to live this life without having to perform for anyone, force a persona, or act a particular role.
The thing is, to lose that belief that only a job/work/career can provide us fulfilment, you have to be willing to go through and sit with the depression and grief of realising that that belief was a lie all along.
I only wish I had the stability to do this. I have family relying on me to pay the bills.
How did you do this (unless you got paid massive bucks) and afford to keep a family?
I disagree with your first points. I believe the majority of people are trying to get ahead, not just subsist. Why else do so many people work so hard? I think it goes to the myth that the poor in the US are poor because they don't work hard. IMO, I've known so many people with teo jobs, ut has a lot more to do with making $25k/yr for full time work. The median income is low, pay is low.
OTOH, I think you also neglect what benefit UBI would have to those who are currently the poorest. Child poverty, poverty, are big problems for millions of Americans.
You can just take money from the rich and give it to the poor. That doesn't have anything to do with UBI. And many of us live in a democracy, so if we all get on the same page, we can decide to just do that.
UBI is some bullshit handwaving to try make social safety nets sound fair. (We give the money to everybody!). We should just stop kidding ourselves and build a more caring and supporting society.
> You can just take money from the rich and give it to the poor. That doesn't have anything to do with UBI.
The reason to write that first sentence is because I pointed out that UBI helps those making less than UBI. Of course then it is pertinent to UBI in so far as it is a mechanism to achieve that goal.
Your original claim that UBI would cause laziness and depression is not further supported by making more claims that UBI is there solely to seem fair.
An argument that I have heard for UBI is: UBI is more effective than social safety nets that are doled out by merit, decided by committee. If you recall the so-called "death panels", government committees who decide who gets what healthcare, there is essentially that with various social programs. UBI has the virtue of simplicity, and uniformity helps ensure reach and therefore efficacy.
I am personally unsure whether UBI is the most effective way to build a supportive society, or if it is as good as its proponents claim. Though, neither do I think (respectfully) that your claims about UBI are well supported either
Except the research shows almost exactly the opposite?
Research doesn’t show the government providing cheap or free money doesn’t inflate prices? We’ve just lived through four years of insane government spending correlated with the highest inflation in over 40 years.
This is an experiment that has been tried and always has the same results: the cost of an item increases by approximately the amount of the subsidy the government provides. UBI experiments “work” because they are elevating the income of a small portion of the population above their peers. It’s not actually universal.
> Research doesn’t show the government providing cheap or free money doesn’t inflate prices?
The post being replied to said:
> There is not doubt in my mind that if we somehow implemented a UBI in a way that would not just result in inflation of rent and everyday goods, the vast majority of people would simply stop working, get bored, depressed, and more likely go looking for mischief before they started working on useful or interesting hobby projects.
So, the response saying that the research doesn't support that conclusion is not about the "that would not just result in" there, it's about countering the remainder of that point. Most people will not choose to do absolutely nothing. (And if some people do, that's fine!)
That's separate from the many arguments that UBI is not inherently inflationary, which neither the post you replied to or the post it replied to were making.
> the cost of an item increases by approximately the amount of the subsidy the government provides.
Vis-a-vis food stamps and unemployment checks, I don't think you can draw the correlation you think exists. Particularly past a certain level of poverty, the state ends up spending more to manage the consequences of unemployment than it saves by refusing to fix it. UBI in this case perpetuates inequity but it also greases the wheels of a down-and-out working population that can be motivated by higher standards of living.
From a net-gain perspective, developed nations investing in themselves like this makes sense. The alternative is letting the middle class rot, which is something that only the upper-class would stand to gain from.
Heck, I'm convinced even the upper class benefits long term from the kind of investment you're talking about, for a bunch of reasons.
To name just two examples: Technological progress happens more smoothly when there are mass markets. Society is healthier and safer when everybody feels like they have a stake in it.
can you elaborate?
Not everyone links their level of wealth to their self esteem. Different strokes for different folks.
So there's always inevitably at least one poorest person in the country who is automatically depressed? Omelas is a law of nature?
Well, the way I see it, there is a real possibility that we're going to have to figure out what to do after that happens some day. There's no fundamental law of nature that guarantees we'll have enough work to keep the vast majority of people working.
It already feels like many of the jobs that exist today are bullshit, and knowing that your job is bullshit is not exactly good for your mental health, either.
I doubt it was the UBI-like aspect of the pandemic that caused the depressive states. Isolation, less active lifestyles, locked inside. Imagine UBI, but with the opposite of all of those!
I have seen it. Take a good look at the Australian government funding central Australian communities and the crime and abuse outcomes in that area.
It will break your heart.
That's why in the sci-fi, utopian economics of the Star Trek Federation they have a "participation based" UBI, where your ticket to the Federation's generous UBI (made possible by effectively infinite material resources) is contingent upon you doing something productive. You can't just sit on your ass all day and collect it.
Now how they measure/judge what's "productive" and the fact that it works at all is what makes it sci-fi, but it highlights that responsibility is critical, even in a utopia.
It's not a Universal Basic Income if it's not Universal.
It's been a while since I watched the series admittedly. IIRC it's honor, influence, and prestige that motivates the people working for the federation.
Star Trek mostly just kind of handwaves this sort of thing rather than actually explaining how it works, which is probably the right narrative decision because it's usually beside whatever point the story is trying to make.
Star Trek handwaves away pretty much all questions about its utopian economics. What's the point in Picard's family owning a vineyard in a world with replicators that can make perfectly aged wine for you in seconds?
I think that almost every episode featuring food from replicators always has someone lamenting that it isn’t the real thing though. So tastes vary. There is tradition. Point enough to have a be vineyard.
Also, what if _everyone_ wants a vineyard in France? Land is still finite, how does one allocate something like that?
Just replicate more France
So in Star Trek artisinal work/projects would not exist?
UBI is a failure of imagination for jobs programs. Don't get me wrong, as a society we should take care of everyone so that no one dies of starvation or freezes to death, but don't just give people handouts, pay people to do stuff. Even something as simple as planting trees.
I think jobs programs are a failure of society to imagine what true abundance looks like, and how abundant our lives are.
In the US, we produce and throw away so much food that overconsumption is vastly more deadly than underconsumption. Hell, we even put corn ethanol into our petro products just to keep the farmland in use.
We could have “universal basic food stamps” pretty much immediately. Affordably too - society is collectively already paying for a multiple of all consumption needs (just out of pocket instead of via government subsidy). People could work for extra income for their specialty foods.
> pay people to do stuff
UBI allows people to choose what stuff they consider productive. UBI means anyone can work on a startup, or try to start a project, or try an artistic endeavor, or do research. UBI means everyone can afford to take some risks and still have a fallback plan.
UBI means you don't have to be productive or take any risks. Just sit back and collect the dole and drink beer and enjoy the sun. Or fentanyl. I'm not against giving people a chance or taking care of people when they're down. I don't think UBI is the way to accomplish that though, and that a well funded, and properly managed jobs programs would do more to improve society, and is more tractable, than giving everybody a magic money fountain.
> UBI means you don't have to be productive or take any risks.
And that's a great thing. My comment is about what it allows people to do and what they can do, not about forcing them to do anything.
If some subset of people choose to relax, temporarily or otherwise, rather than go work a low-paying job, so be it. That's not just an "acceptable negative", that's a positive, that people can do that.
UBI shouldn't be set at a level that makes it comfortable to have zero income forever. UBI should be set at a level that makes it reliably survivable to have zero income. There will always be incentives to work, and there will always be people who choose not to, and both of those things are fine.
> properly managed jobs programs
The difference I was highlighting between UBI and a jobs program is precisely that UBI doesn't require defining what qualifies as a job, and supports trying novel things that don't immediately pay out enough to support you. You don't need make-work jobs, you don't have the problem of people being automated out of a job (so automation is much more often a good thing), you have a massive renaissance in startups and ventures of all sorts, you have lower administrative costs because you don't have means testing or ...
All the cases of people suddenly finding themselves with an obsolete skillset? They'd be able to afford to take a year off to reinvent themselves and become more productive again, rather than having to immediately jump on whatever work they can get.
> and is more tractable
I've seen many cases made that UBI is an easier sell across the political spectrum than jobs programs or welfare programs would be. Lower administrative costs, smaller public sector, net win for the economy, higher likelihood of more people becoming more successful and depending on it less...
How about reforming the WPA [1] and build free basic housing. Let the for profit house building corporations handle the luxury stuff. Actually, that's all they are interested in doing anyways.
We should stop begging them to build what we need and just do it ourselves.
1 - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Works_Progress_Administratio...
Slate Star Codex made an argument against it here https://www.slatestarcodexabridged.com/Basic-Income-Not-Basi...
It's been a few years but my recollection is something like:
1. The jobs that are crappy enough for jobs programs are not useful jobs to be done anyway.
2. The overhead involved in having a job (Transportation, childcare, all kinds of second-order negatives on your life) can easily outweigh shitty salaries. Also jobs programs would be worse for people with kids, unless you add more child tax credit to prop up that side of the stool.
3. Having a job takes away free time that otherwise could be used for training or education. Planting trees by hand in the sun is not going to look like anything on anyone's resume. You could put another leg on the stool by having a college grant program or something, but it's another step away from jobs and towards UBI
If you're going to pay people to do something pointless, maybe just pay them to exist anyway?
Why do they have to be crappy? Why wouldn't childcare be a job in the jobs program? Or teaching? or driver? Scott Alexander doesn't think deeply or fully address that in that piece, choosing instead to use a strawman to say it just won't work, but less critically that UBI somehow magically would.
Interesting that I observed the opposite. During the pandemic people I know who had to work were sent into extreme psychological dysfunction that they're still dealing with the fallout that followed. Those that didn't need to work flourished.
As others commented there can be a dozen other reason to be depressed under the pandemic other than UBI like revenues.
Also UBI does not stop you from doing work. UBI does not want to be a complete replacement of work related revenues, just the basic needs are covered. So if you have a minimum of ambition, you'll go for a job. UBI is just your safety net, so you must not become something that you feel is a slave or stuck in with bad people just to pay rent. Quite different story compared to what you painted here like people just don't work. Also would be interesting to see this unfolding for 10 years. Maybe humans are just lazy but quite the opposite can happen as well and those stories will drag people along. Of course some of us are going to fuck it up that's for sure.
During the pandemic, my roommate and I built so much shit.
We built a full wooden camper setup with electrical and plumbing. We sketched and crafted new furniture for our apartment. We designed and built our own hydroponics system.
And we skated a lot and hiked where we could. We did also play a lot of video games.
The minimum wage was meant to be a "universal basic wage", and it has been corroded to uselessness over time.
$7.25 an hour
What is different in modern times that would prevent the same from happening to UBI?
I expect that advances in AI and robotics will make most human labor obsolete (economically unviable) in the next few decades. I expect widespread adoption of UBI as a consequence.
I have also considered the fact that most people just sort of "drift" if there isn't an external system forcing them to stay on track. I suspect we're going to see "fake jobs" subsidized by the system for the sake of maintaining widespread sanity.
Well fake jobs isn't quite the right name, rather they'd be real jobs but a portion of the UBI budget (or wherever it comes from) would be spent maintaining a human economy for the people (most people?) who apparently require such a system to stay sane. I say fake because they wouldn't be economically viable without the subsidy.
Of course, work isn't the only way to stay busy or sane. I think we'll also see a lot more hobby groups and general community gatherings.
Does UBI pay enough to support a ski bum lifestyle? That’s probably what I would do if I had guaranteed income with no job.
Your friends are not working because of people are so used to the “rails” that a job guides them and spoon feed them what exactly to do and with what consequences, this is why UBI isn’t gonna be what that commenter fantasies about. Most people does not have the will power to force and give themselves consequences and stick to it, because they are their own boss.
Super honest feedback on UBI. I'm glad we saw it develop before us with COVID, there is something there that may work, but simple UBI doesn't work evidently
> UBI-like circumstances for me and my friend group
> during the pandemic
Lol you really think generalizing emotional states from a global lockdown is smart?
UBI won't work: it's almost implemented in my country (you can get 600€/month + many other welfare stuff by not working) and what's the result? Highest public deficit in the EU zone, highest tax rate in the world, rampant criminality, difficulty to get money by working because of said taxes, educated people leaving the country in mass, etc.
Reality #1: Universal Basic Income (UBI) will empower people to break free from the grind of work. They'll have the freedom to start innovative companies, create art, make music, learn to dance, and generally enjoy happier, less stressful lives.
Reality #2: Alternatively, many might find themselves stuck at home, glued to their screens. This could lead to boredom and depression, resulting in online trolling and petty arguments. Some may even resort to crime out of frustration.
What you’re describing isn’t UBI; it’s just traditional welfare. UBI advocates are aware of problems with welfare and believe that UBI wouldn’t suffer from the same issues.
Why not though? The money has to come from somewhere. Why would UBI not tremendously raise taxes and thereby undermine the incentive to work just as GP observes?
There's actually two ways that the situation described above undermines the incentive to work.
The first is that - and this is one of the key distinctions - welfare programs are means-tested whereas UBI is (as the name implies) universal: everyone gets it whether they're working or need it or not. The post above says "you can get 600€/month + many other welfare stuff by not working"; if you lose that welfare by starting to work, this hugely incentivizes not working! Worse still, it incentivizes black market labour - money earned under the table isn't going to be counted against your means-testing. This is at best productive but untaxed, at worst actively destructive or criminal.
The other is, as you've pointed out, high taxation. I believe the UBI advocate's response to this would be some combination of: 1) UBI will supersede a multitude of complex, means-tested welfare programs and will be cheaper to administer as well, so the increase to taxation won't be as substantial as you might imagine; 2) giving people freedom to pursue education/creativity/entrepeneurship, UBI will spur on economic growth that will help it pay for itself (as would disincentivizing black market labour, as described above); and 3) the extent to which taxation disincentivizes productivity is overstated, or is perhaps contingent on the particular taxation scheme, and they support one that they think won't have deleterious effects.
FWIW I personally suspect UBI would be a pretty good idea, but I'm at least a little skeptical about some of these arguments as I understand them; nevertheless, various people who've studied the issue extensively and with a stronger background in economics buy them, so I accept that they're at least worth taking seriously.
No true Scotsman
> No true Scotsman or appeal to purity is an informal fallacy in which one attempts to protect an a posteriori claim from a falsifying counterexample by covertly modifying the initial claim.
No one has covertly modified the initial claim. UBI has a long-standing definition that’s distinct from welfare.
France?
If minimum wage didn’t work, what metric makes you believe that a similar system but paying those who don’t work, will?
This type of thinking truly baffles me. This magic UBI will be minimum wage for the masses that don’t work.
How could that, possibly, be sustainable or even good?
Answering your literal question, how could it "possibly" be good:
Minimum wage probably doesn't work because it means a lot of people live in precarity while both emotionally and physically exhausting them. It might just be that minimum wage has stagnated while COL has skyrocketed. If the point of minimum wage is that it provides people with a guaranteed dignified life as long as they are employed, that needs to keep up with the cost of living a normal life in order to keep its effectiveness. That is one reason it might be "failing" although I don't know exactly what you mean by that.
> get us from the service economy to agency and self-actualization
This is the thing I think most people have a hard time connecting to "measurable utility" but will probably be the most sweeping effect of UBI or similar. Think about your typical gig worker, minimum wage worker in some high-turnover environment etc. This person probably does not have the financial safety net to pursue something meaningful, or to take the risk reskilling, or to otherwise improve their emotional and financial well-being.
You will probably always have free-riders or people who just want to consume without producing. But is it better to have a society of exhausted, frustrated, barely-hanging-on people, or a society of people with the _potential_ to to be creative, passionate, and exploratory?
Conversely to you, I find it hard to imagine that a society with surplus wealth would be more effective if it chose to subject its people to precarity and emotional strife instead of empowering as many of its people as possible.
Some references: https://www.epi.org/publication/charting-wage-stagnation/ https://www.statista.com/chart/25574/living-wage-vs-minimum-...
Why not just have unemployment benefits or new enterprise grants? Why do you need UBI?
Here in Australia there is quite a bit of money floating around for those people with passions and potential. I've received quite a bit over the years taking chances, some of it as grants, some as government investments.
I've been fortunate and never had to rely on unemployment benifits, but I always knew in the back of my mind it was available if I fail. Soon I'll be able to fall back on my aged care benefits :)
Unemployment benefits and other income-dependent benefits are a strong incentive against working, unless the job pays particularly well. It's common that the effective tax rate for low-paying jobs is 80-90%, if you count lost benefits in addition to taxes. Sometime the rate exceeds 100%. In order to get unemployed people back to work against their own interests, unemployment benefits often come with strict time limits, a lot of surveillance and bureaucracy, and a general loss of dignity.
The "basic" in UBI aims to solve that by changing benefits and taxes. Everyone from the homeless to the billionaires gets the same benefits, while income taxes will make sure that most people won't see any additional money. The differences are only seen by people with low incomes. While the benefits may be a little lower, taking a low-paying job makes much more sense, as your tax rate may be as low as 40%.
Many old-school unions oppose UBI because it makes low-paying jobs more viable. They consider it morally wrong. According to them, if you work full time, the employer should pay you enough that you don't need any government handouts for a dignified live.
Id love to understand how unemployment benefits discourage working more than a UBI. Either you need to work to survive or you don't.
I've read some comments here recently that suggests people feel like they have a right to a nice life after being born. As I get older I see humans more like any other animal born into an uncaring universe out in nature. You have to get out of that borrow, hunt and forage to survive. It's not the responsibility of every other human to have food delivered to your burrow.
Look up welfare trap. Many benefit programs are implemented such that they go away the second you start working. This means if I am getting $X per week in welfare but I get an employment offer of $Y per week where Y<X, then I am incentivized to stay on welfare. Even if Y>X, it often makes sense to stay on welfare because you might have to start paying for child care, or buy a second car to get to work, etc...
> You have to get out of that borrow, hunt and forage to survive.
Modern society has put significant constraints on how I can pursue survival. I can't just go and fish in the ocean, because there are regulations on how and what I can catch. I can't just go and farm a little piece of land because almost all land is owned by someone or something. Of the many reasons I think UBI is a good idea, a major reason is that I consider it payment for the loss of "natural rights" that we give up in order to live in a modern society. I think fishing regulations are good thing, but they also curtail my ability to subsist, so I think UBI is a good compensation for that.
> This means if I am getting $X per week in welfare but I get an employment offer of $Y per week where Y<X, then I am incentivized to stay on welfare.
Yes, sure, but this applies to UBI as well. If Y is not worth my time actually doing the work, after you pay for that card and child care, would I bother? Is UBI a comfortable life, or is it bare minimum to live?
>a major reason is that I consider it payment for the loss of "natural rights" that we give up in order to live in a modern society.
I don't mind this argument, but lets remember that in order to assert your natural rights you need to actually work. If you were allowed to fish and hunt, you would have go out and do it. UBI suggests you can just do nothing and be handed a living.
I would much prefer we provide unemployment or disability to anybody who wants it because I want to live in a compassionate and caring society, but we don't have to call it a UBI, give it to everybody, and turn the world on its head.
Then I think we should also guarantee a job for anybody who wants one, with a significant step up in income. (And right now that job should be capturing carbon.)
With UBI, the job effectively pays more, and the incentives to take it are stronger.
A hypothetical example with arbitrary numbers:
You get $20k/year in benefits. You are offered a job that pays $30k/year, but then you have to pay $5k in taxes and you lose the benefits. The job would effectively pay you $2.5/hour after taxes, which is not very attractive.
With UBI, you get to keep the benefits, but you pay a 40% tax for all earned income. Your after-tax income would be $38k/year, and your effective wage would be $9/hour after taxes. Still not very good but much better than the $2.5/hour.
Yes. Moreover, all prices will jump 3-100x, so UBI will be useless anyway: you must go to work or die in poverty. UBI is also known as "true socialism".
Who said minimum wage didn't work? It works, provided you adjust its value regularly.
Anyway, I've met a few people who, through a combination of welfare and inherited wealth don't really have to work.
While most are simply living their best life spending time on unprofitable hobbies like photography one example stands out as he's currently busy driving into Ukraine and back with supplies for the people there.
What I'm getting at is that in reality we don't actually know what would happen under UBI. Maybe more children would be born, as another example from my list is currently a father and (to the best of my knowledge) still jobless?
Part of me wonders if this parallels the venture capital approach. Many won't don't anything economically productive with the opportunity UBI affords them, but the ones that do may make the cost worthwhile.
Not sure if that's how it would actually pan out, of course, but I think it's plausible.
Minimum wage and UBI aren’t the same thing so you can’t extrapolate the results of one into the other.
I believe UBI would require a few external attractors / motivators to avoid people being dilluted in choice and fuzzy self actualization path.
>How could that, possibly, be sustainable or even good?
It isn't. Like most magical thinking economic proposals, it's simply a matter of ignoring reality.
"In the Carboniferous Epoch we were promised abundance for all, By robbing selected Peter to pay for collective Paul; But, though we had plenty of money, there was nothing our money could buy, And the Gods of the Copybook Headings said: "If you don't work you die.""
...
"And that after this is accomplished, and the brave new world begins When all men are paid for existing and no man must pay for his sins, As surely as Water will wet us, as surely as Fire will burn, The Gods of the Copybook Headings with terror and slaughter return!"
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Gods_of_the_Copybook_Hea...
I’ve been going back and working on retro development. These days, making software for the 68K Macintosh, which is where I learned to program in the first place. I dug a lot through old books, comp.sys.mac.programmer posts, and the source code from Soft Dorothy and others (like the GliderPro source).
It’s a trip seeing this old code through new eyes. I can see why the old Macs crashed so much (beyond the basic “they had no memory protection” explanation). I’m also fond of the 1-bit art, like the author mentions, and I curate a list of accounts on Twitter which post 1-but artwork (if you know anybody who’s missing from the list, let me know): https://twitter.com/i/lists/1578111923324944397
The nice thing about programming for a limited system is that it limits your options. It’s a nice break from the more modern experience where you can do anything by pulling in the right library. I sometimes imagine a world where computational power is frozen, and we simple get better and better software for systems that are well-understood. The thing about these old systems like the Mac 68K machines is that the pace of hardware development was so fast it made you dizzy. If a new processor came out like the 68020 or 80386, then you had maybe a couple years at most to make something that really used it to its full potential. If you waited too long, you’d be competing against a new generation of software written for a new generation of hardware.
I do 1-bit art for a limited platform (Playdate, so not quite Macintosh Plus limited) I'm @gingerbeardman on Twitter. Examples: https://blog.gingerbeardman.com/2024/07/14/shibuya-pixel-art...
Going back and looking at my code — with over 30 years of hindsight — I want to refactor it, simplify the common crap you had to do like responding to window events, etc....
Never mind making wrapper functions for dealing with Handles and such.
To your point though, wow, how much simpler the Toolbox was compared to a modern OS. It does indeed feel fun to try some retro development again.
That's a neat blog all around. Lots of interesting stuff to poke around in.
I think it's okay to abandon things, and you can certainly learn things and reuse parts from abandoned projects. For me, a breakthrough moment was when I decided to make things so small that I could finish them. It helped me develop the skill of finishing things, which is a separate skill that's hard to learn, because it only happens at the end of a process so long and hard you almost never make it there. All my friends who are making video games start by writing their own engine, and get burnt out somewhere around the point where they're making a level editor. They learn a lot about things like tooling (which, coincidentally, is a lot like what they already knew how to do), but never actually make the game. It'd be like learning stone masonry by building a cathedral—you won't live to see the end. Start so small that you can't fail, then work your way up to bigger and bigger projects.
> All my friends who are making video games start by writing their own engine
I've been there and done that one a few times. Even if you decide to use existing tools, you can easily get caught up in these infinitely-deep pools of complexity.
I am working on a Unity project right now wherein I found myself antagonizing over how to best develop an RTS-style building placement system. Instead of doing what I would typically do (dive right in), I decided that I would rework the game concept to eliminate the need for the player to place buildings at all. After some experimentation, it turned out that this was actually a superior user experience for what I was trying to achieve. I initially rationalized it as "I'll add the building system in the next iteration". It likely won't happen now.
Less is almost always more. That small starting point actually being finished is like nitromethane for the next iteration. Getting to 100% is what makes that next pass so much better. Getting to 80% will leave you feeling like you need to push the rock back up the hill all over again.
> I decided that I would rework the game concept to eliminate the need for the player to place buildings at all.
This sounds interesting. Can you explain a bit more about this?
Sure. I replaced the building system with a big portal that each team controls. Instead of in-game buildings, I built a menu/UI system that allows the player to control which units would come out of the portal. Units don't take commands from the player (another massive simplification). They only seek out the enemy portal and will engage other units on that path automatically. Destruction of the portal is the win condition.
Unity's navmesh system is doing most of the heavy lifting right now. It's amazing how much functionality you can get out of it before you have to reach for physics and animation.
This reminds me of something mixing the Age of War flash game (which had great music) and TeamFight Tactics (TFT). An RTS without some kind of unit control seems strange, but interesting as it is often the greatest barrier to accessing the game.
Sounds vaguely similar to a late 90’s pc/playstation game I recall playing, although that also had capture points and the ability to build defense structures along the predetermined paths.
Edit - this one https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Future_Cop:_LAPD
I don't think I've ever finished a _single_ personal project. At least for me that's _the_ hardest skill to develop.
Luckily this is also on the front page today: https://github.com/readme/guides/finish-your-projects
Thank you for sharing this! I think a focus on shrinking personal projects to the point I might actually finish them, might be just what I need right now
>> I think it's okay to abandon things, and you can certainly learn things and reuse parts from abandoned projects.
I recently moved from front-end development into accessibility. Years ago, I had built a bunch of static sites, templates and other design projects that I had eventually abandoned for various reasons.
Now that I'm in accessibility, I've gone back and dug many of these out and have re-built them to be accessible. Several used very old versions of bootstrap, so part of what I did was also upgrading to the latest version of bootstrap as well.
I learned so much just from going back and making those older designs accessible. Its something that I definitely feel gave me a better perspective on stuff we look for when we're assessing sites and applications. It was also a real wake up as to how much of the stuff I built wasn't accessible at all.
> It helped me develop the skill of finishing things, which is a separate skill that's hard to learn, because it only happens at the end of a process so long and hard you almost never make it there.
Great insight. The skill of finishing what you started, is something that feels elided in discussions around productivity. Is there a blogpost or article that explains it even more?
John, your games were an inspiration to me when I was a kid first learning my way around programming on the Mac. I spent a lot of time playing Glider and even more playing Pararena. I still have the echo-y startup sample of that lodged in my head.
I probably spent even more time poking around in the resource forks of your games in ResEdit.
I didn't finish much, but I did complete a couple of little shareware games and uploaded them to AOL. I was beyond surprised when a check from far away California appeared in my mailbox many months later.
Those early Mac days really did feel like a special time where anything was possible a solo developer could make a thing and put it out into the world without needing more than creativity and time.
Thank you for writing these posts and sending me down memory lane. I hope you're enjoying your retirement.
Maybe you read some of the other posts of mine (or the README's for the disk image repos). It was a special time.
Was it special because it was all new to us as early computer-users, early developers? Or was there something different in the air back then....
I'm glad you liked the little games I wrote.
Was it the check from California that pushed you into your current career (whatever that is)?
Some of the pixel art in those screenshots is seriously awesome!
If the goal of this article is to normalize abandoning your projects then I'm not so sure it's a good idea. All else aside it can be a horrendous waste of time and no amount of "at least I've learned something" can justify that. Learn by also finishing stuff, right?
There's a great Smarter Every Day episode where Destin works with a glassblowing shop to create shattered Prince Rupert's drops encased in blocks of resin.
Nobody has done this before, they're working out how to do it as they go along, they make quite a few mistakes along the way. One of the things the video highlights is how, when this happens, the team wouldn't just stop and try the same thing again. They'd keep going, break it all the way, basically just use it as an opportunity to fuck around with their materials.
He waxes poetic about how great this is. They're taking advantage of an unparalleled opportunity to learn more about the behavior of the materials they're working with. Because they're now free to try things they wouldn't want to do if they were still on the path to creating a complete, polished product. It doesn't even really count as taking risks anymore, because you can't really mess up something that's already trash.
And he points out, rightly, that a mindset like that that values learning and experimentation over always succeeding, is one of the best ways to become truly great at what you do.
The thing is that he also finished stuff.
The goal is to avoid analysis paralysis and "just try it" instead of keep thinking about it.
It's a bias toward action and rejecting sunk cost.
That is a misreading of the article. It's more about discovery through quick, iterative prototyping, which can include rapid discovery of fatal flaws early.
+1 I am reading this is exactly pointing to the same concept as the todo management, but not addressing the todo paralysis. Everyone's mileage may vary. I accept that. Yet misreading something is far more dangerous than ignorance.
As Musk would say: Waste metal, not time.
The man that spent his time on an overpriced takeover and subsequent ruining of Twitter instead of spending that time with the children he abandoned is a cautionary tale of wasted time, not a sage to be mined for wisdom.
Wasting metal instead of time is the difference between Dragon and Starliner.
I will listen to the guy who's actually getting things done, thanks.
Imagine how much more he would get done if he addressed his mental illness and filled his life with the richness of family and social bonds instead of wasting that time gaming an algorithm on a platform he paid too much for to become the leading proprietor of authoritarian-conservative junk posting.
If anyone thinks he doesn't have enough time for that, go over to Twitter and look at what he's doing with that time he doesn't have right now.
> Imagine how much more he would get done if he addressed his mental illness and filled his life with the richness of family and social bonds
His life might be richer, but I don't think he would get more done. I do think he is a cautionary tale, but there are also many insights to be gained.
You shouldn't optimize your life for output, but for those moments when you do want to optimize your output it makes sense to glean from those who are very good at it.
Is being an avoidant parent a precondition to being a successful executive? My direct anecdotal experience with successful executives is quite the opposite.
I really think we're giving him far too much credit to assume this is all an intentional time-saving life hack to improve his ability to optimize his output for some planet-saving goal (which his most recent work, frankly, has not been).
> Imagine how much more he would get done if he addressed his mental illness and filled his life with the richness of family and social bonds
The people I know who satisfy that definition don't generally get shit done. The ones who do are outliers; i.e. so rare that you may as well judge them to be a rounding error.
My only takeaway from this exchange is you're jealous the man had the money to just go and buy Mysterious Twitter X and do with it as he wants, instead of complaining about it like the rest of us.
I would like you to image a day in his life.
His pleasures, accomplishments, fears, and compulsions.
A personality and a lifestyle that drives away everyone except acquaintances and employees.
The kind of insecurity that causes a person to gravely insult a someone who risked their life, many times over, to save the lives of strangers half a world from their home because they dismissed your media ploy in public.
The kind of personality that is so addicted to attention that despite repeated public embarrassments that would make most people rethink their actions, they reform their own worldview in order to blame society instead of rightfully feeling ashamed.
A person who has a compulsion to make money constantly when there is no longer any purpose to do so -- to the point where they use guest appearances on comedy shows to pump and dump novelty crypto coins in order to make a few more pennies.
Does that sound like a happy, content person? If anyone is jealous of that life just so that they can have the fame then all I can say is that there is ever an opportunity where one of us can grab that for themselves, please -- be my guest.
> The kind of insecurity that causes a person to gravely insult a someone who risked their life, many times over, to save the lives of strangers half a world from their home because they dismissed your media ploy in public.
Called him a pedophile no less. He didn't win the libel case in court, but he certainly deserved to.
The actual story of the cave rescue and the highly specialized cave divers that pulled it off is quite incredible, I highly recommend seeing it as it happens in The Rescue. The documentary takes the high ground and doesn't mention the Musk fiasco, but without directly doing so, also lays waste to how impossible the submarine idea was: https://films.nationalgeographic.com/the-rescue
Is he actually calling it Mysterious Twitter X now?
It is funny how much criticism you are taking for saying things that are obviously true.
Yes, Musk's personal life is a mess and noone would enjoy being him.
That can be true at the same time as his business philosophy effectively pushes forward multiple businesses more quickly than their competitors. That can even be true while his businesses are run in ways that most of us would find unacceptable.
Regardless of palatability, SpaceX is effective.
It's worth pointing out here that SpaceX's current product development practices and Boeing's current product development practices is a bit of a false dichotomy. We could also, for example, consider how Boeing did things a few decades ago.
One particular reason I don't like this false dichotomy is that SpaceX's approach has negative externalities that aren't getting enough attention because everybody's so starstruck by all the fancy rockets. There's a reason the FAA and EPA are starting to pressure SpaceX about the environmental and social impact of their way of doing business. Maybe next OSHA can get on them for the high workplace injury rate. You're not actually doing things more cheaply if what you're really doing is hiding costs that would belong on your balance sheet by surreptitiously foisting them onto the public with the help of corrupt politicians.
(Ostensible libertarians, pay extra attention to those last six words.)
I think it's healthy for projects to die. It frees up your time to start another project, instead of being stuck in a rut.
I sometimes find myself working on a project that goes nowhere, thinking that if I just put enough effort it will go somewhere, and I'm not having any fun or learning new things. And I'm hard on myself with thoughts like "I need to finish it, I need to finish it" but then when I ask myself: 'why?', it's usually because of this fear of _not finishing the project_ or maybe it's the fear of not being able to distinguish the grinding phase from the failed project phase.
Either way, too many times I have experienced a liberating feeling when I failed. It's a chance to start over.
Survival of the fittest, for sure!
I think it's a bad title. The moral is more like "work on everything you can think of but don't release anything until it's ready. And some projects will never be ready, but that's OK - you can look at them 30 years later and release them on github for nostalgia." ChatGPT summarizes it as "Build Fast, Ship Never (Until You Do)"
The title is an adaptation of "Move Fast and Break Things" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Move_fast_and_break_things
Maybe take things as far as they should go, but no further.
also: sunk cost fallacy
Like John Lennon once said, time you enjoy wasting isn't wasted.
Artists can say that, especially if it's John Lennon :) but I'm not sure I can apply it to myself
Well, the blog is called Engineers Need Art.
I think your reluctance comes from a different prioritization. The writer is clearly interested in developing their creativity (and are wildly succeeding!). The project is the means to do that. Continuing on a project even after it no longer is the best use of your time is just a type of sunk cost fallacy.
Why?
Personally I've learned (and earned) way more by shipping small things and THEN iterating on them. Or abandoning them.
The car prototype reminded me of Spy Hunter graphics, but I couldn't remember that NES game's name at first. Sent me on a nice nostalgia dive!
I like this and find it interesting, but at an organizational level, it strikes me as trickier to do. A lot of the things we discover about projects and technologies have to do with its feasibility at whatever scale our real projects operate on, and don't necessarily pop-up in smaller experiments. (And sometimes they aren't really technical issues at all, but issues of "can we get most developers here to understand doing it this way.)
None of which means we shouldn't do more of this. You can learn things by trying smaller projects. It's just not a guarantee it will work in the large.
Great to see this do numbers. I posted it last week but it didn't gain any traction
I love this but I approach it a bit differently. I don't think this is a good excuse to write bad or unmaintainable code. Sure some shortcuts are fine but it should be useful for the next person.
Personally I try to use free hosting services so that I don't have to pay to keep it running when I abandon it. (That could be AWS free tier or blockchain or IPFS etc). Use a public repository so someone else can find it when it's inevitable dropped. I always make sure to have good documentation so that once it's found anyone can get it running.
Some of the worst advice I read comes from some of the smartest people out there.
Move Fast and Abandon Things: The Google Story
It’s interesting to consider how your guerrilla programming techniques could integrate with contemporary development tools and practices.
For instance, leveraging version control systems more extensively or utilizing collaborative platforms might enhance the efficiency and scalability of your projects.
this seems like a fantastic way to look back on a career where the author started as a prolific solo developer and later became an effective, fast, and contributing part of an effective development team. it was also just really fun to read, about the code reuse, the scrapping of ideas, the rewrites, etc.
Yes and:
Quote from another blog entry
"In the end I think Apple got an engineer for the next twenty-five years that, though not the cleverest engineer, was one that worked quickly to prototype new ideas and took on some of the gruntwork that not every engineer wanted to work on."
Some of us like doing the blue-collar parts. Plumbing, prototyping, fixing bugs, fit & finish, tackling tech debt.
Alas, today's leetcode themed hazing rituals, err, interviewing filters out people like me, and presumably John Calhoun.
I was fortunate to manage project and product teams with a mix of skills, temperments, experience. Pairing up doers with esthetes can work out great. In that "whole greater than the sum" sort of way.
FWIW, most of the doers (I've managed or worked with) had no CS education and experience. Just an interest, curiousity in tech. Notables were a ballet dancer, historian, handful of mechanics, biologist, aeronautic engineer, sculpture, and of course musicians. People who would never get hired, much less considered, today.
Every team needs at least one doer.
Somewhat related, I think, I am always surprised at how often we don't have non-critical paths in jobs. Half the reason stress is so high, it seems, is we have backed ourselves into a situation where things have to succeed.
Engineer Sneed Art
Glad I'm not the only one who parsed the domain as such :)
When I read articles like this, I feel nostalgia and envy. Why was I not born 10 years earlier? I see other people in my industry who are 10 years older than me and they not only had a way more fulfilling career, they are much better off financially too. It's like everything fell on their lap.
The new Google motto?
Sure, why not. It's a good approach for innovation.
Dad??
Mines just time. I get home from work, the last thing I want to do is sit in front of my computer.
With two days off a week to fulfil with chores, I still don't want to sit in front of a computer screen.
I'm a junior, currently trying to get an internship and subsequent job.
I envy anyone that can do what you do. At the moment it feels like the industry is a cult, only looking for people that make tech and programming their entire life. I don't even mind the requirements, I have a work ethic and want to perform well, but the expectations seem higher than ever.
I'm looking forward to finally having enough job security for a hobby that doesn't involve staring at computer screens (hoping to get into metal work soon).
That's exactly the playbook how they destroyed Perl6 then. They had the very same outspoken motto "Move fast and destroy things". They indeed do so very successfully, instead of fixing just the few outstanding bugs.
That's not what the OP said. He said, "Try things quickly, and abandon the ones that don't pan out." Nothing in there about destroying things that are working.
I didn't say that. I said that you should not destroy things that dont work. You should rather fix it.
Why? It's an idea you try to see if it has value. If it turns out not to have value, move on to something else.
this is the way
Abandoning things is essential to development. If we didn't let things go, we'd be stuck with all of our weaker ideas. That doesn't mean they are bad or a waste of time, but rather you reach a point at which you realize there is something better you could be doing and move on. This can be painful but it's necessary.
I keep beating this drum but I believe there is a significant amount of pain in software because people shipped first drafts and got stuck with foundational design issues. Once this has gone on long enough, even a greenfield rewrite is hard because both the programmers and the users have internalized the flawed design.
And in many cases the entire org chart has been built around the first draft. It's psychologically hard for developers and for people paying the bills to throw stuff away, so we often dig in our heals and accept the first solution that works, along with the tech debt and resulting pain.
Now the drum I keep beating is - software process needs a design phase. You need some plan, some coherent vision of the architecture, otherwise you get a system held together with duct tape and prayers.
Agile made it fashionable to sprint ahead without any coherent plan.
Waterfall obsessed about the plan and failed to adapt to new circumstances.
There has to be somewhere in the middle where a design is subject to empirical testing. We have to change the design based on results of running real code. In other words, when the first draft doesn't work quite right, you don't ignore it (Agile) or try to shoehorn it into the existing design (Waterfall) - you change the design and try again. "Throwing stuff away" could be reframed as the scientific method. This needs to be normalized as a part of the process so we remove the stigma of "failed" experiments, which are not failures but valuable sources of information that improve the final product.
I'm not sure I am all for abandoning all projects, but I do remember reading a comment on this very website that really resonated with me.
Someone was complaining about always starting projects, but never finishing said projects.
To paraphrase another user's response, it was something like, "Not all projects need to be finished in order for value to be gained. To borrow a concept from Buddhism, perhaps you found what you were looking for all along?"
The irony of the #3 thing on HN today being this, and the #5 thing being 'Finish Your Projects' haha. Good points all around.
I think that these ideas are both compatible. In this blog post, it looks like the author finished working prototypes of several games but elected not to push them to a full release. So I think they “finished” the work, and we can’t fault them for estimating that it wouldn’t be worthwhile to make a full release.
Not finishing a project in this case would be abandoning a game idea that you liked before you even got to a working prototype stage. Because then you can’t even see if your new idea plays well.
Yeah totally, I don’t disagree with that assessment. I would say it’s not productive to try to complete every single thing we start. It was just the headline snippets that were funny to me.
In a sense though, seeing that whatever project we're working on is no longer worth pursuing, is finishing that project.
That's very different from letting life happen and stop working on it without really having decided it.
Closure is important! I do feel that I get in the mindset of saying “I’m gonna get back to this later” and it just never happens, meanwhile taking precious mental capacity every time I think about doing that thing. It’s okay to say “I tried it, I don’t need to prove anything, on to the next adventure”.
I usually think of abandoning and finishing as two different ways to resolve a project. Resolution is a good goal that allows you to be explicit about what was finished or not before stopping.