I'm sorry, I really did try to read this because it sounded like it might interesting, but it's well over 2.5K words and by about halfway through I still had no idea what it was really about. I skipped down to the final paragraph and that still didn't seem to tell me. May I respectfully suggest that future posts this long have a one-line or at least one-paragraph summary at the top?
I agree. I'm outraged and disgusted by things I've seen over the past 12 months-- some have happened to me, most to other people-- and it's really affecting the quality of my writing.
I agree with you. Usually I put 1-2 months before writing a blog post/essay and posting it. I just see this matter as a bit more urgent, as I really want to see the American Spring (the 2012 campaign of people calling out unethical behaviors at companies, rather than protecting scummy ex-employers) happen.
Words-of-prose can be like lines-of-code: beyond about 500, it takes a long process of review not to have some degree of mess.
I wouldn't be so hard on this essay. It's a little scattered, but there's some gold in there. Writing a concise, powerful essay is really, really hard, which is one of the reasons that people who are really good at it become famous (Jonathan Swift, Christopher Hitchens, etc).
Thanks. Usually I have a 1-day/500-word minimum between initial writing of anything like this and posting it, because I don't want to embarrass myself with mediocre writing. I like to have days between drafts.
This time, I want a message to get out, and fast.
I might rewrite it in a week or so. Pretty much all of my 2000+ word blog posts deserve to be more than one post.
Halfway through I got a feeling that (a) the author doesn't know what he's writing about, (b) he's never read Eric Ries, otherwise he would at least state somewhere early a different interpretation of what "fail fast" could mean.
I did, actually. In systems, failing fast (as opposed to silent failure) is a good thing. Technical fast-failure is often correct. Better to catch the bug at compile time than at runtime. Better to throw an exception than do the wrong thing. Full agreement. No question there. That's because failure is objective and should be reported (and acted on) fast.
I haven't read Eric Ries, so I have no opinion of him. I know that people are using "fail fast" to justify being ethically sloppy. I don't have any basis for assessing whether this has anything to do with Ries. Quite probably, it doesn't.
Thanks for the reply. Brief disclaimer: (a) I should probably explain myself somewhere other than in an HN comment, (b) I'm still learning many things myself, so I welcome any criticism someone more knowledgeable than me may have.
I feel that you're missing an important consequence of "failing fast". That consequence is something that struck me when I was reading Ries, but I don't think that one must read Ries to realize it. You write as if your peek from a systems perspective provides a ready answer to why "failing fast" could be a good thing, but it doesn't. Here is the best I can do to explain myself.
Startups are hard. People put a lot of work into them. Oftentimes, the work turns out to be in vain. The "in vain" part is precisely what makes startups hard. If the work one put into a startup was not in vain, then almost by definition doing a startup would become no different than holding a 9-5 job except with longer hours. Now, "failing fast" means that the moment when you learn that the work you did was in vain comes sooner rather than later. Thus "failing fast" reduces the amount of work you do in vain, which is generally a good thing. So far this is no different than the systems thinking and your analogy with compilation/runtime engineering process you describe.
Here is the crucial part though. By going somewhere and finding out it's a dead end, you learn something (gain information). Now fixing a bug early rather than late provides you with no new knowledge, so this is where the difference I'm talking about comes in. Think of knowledge that a certain directions are dead ends as if it was some surplus value. You accumulate that surplus value the more "dead ends" you try. If exploring dead ends had no associated cost (both timewise and monetary), it would be in your interest to explore as many "ends" as there are, in hope that perhaps one of them leads outside the maze, which would be a breakthrough. Note that it would never be in your interest to introduce as many bugs in a program as you possibly can. Coming back to startups, there is normally a cost associated with failure. If startups are run in a certain way, however, that cost is minimized, and then you find out that, at early stages at least, the benefits of exploring different directions may outweigh the risks.
I really like the motivating idea behind this post, and read all the way through for that reason. It has some good points (the 30/60/90 PIP example), but it's hard to remember the key points.
As a fan of the idea, I hope you can spend a little more time to tighten it up and add some more concrete examples (some of the points seemed a little hard for me to picture concretely).
I guess the key point is: a lot of people are using "fail fast" as an excuse for behaviors that previous generations would consider frankly irresponsible, if not unethical, and I think the general element of scumbaggery that we've seen in technology of late is a result of this absurd ideology.
Very unethical and irresponsible behavior has been around a long time. Internet Bubble v1.0 had a world of crap going on, with much bigger dollar-numbers for the investments.
I was born in 1983, so I missed the first Bubble, but I believe you. I worked for someone (also a total sleaze) who had a late-1990s startup and once spent close to $2 million (out of about $15m on hand) on a launch party. Over 10% of working capital on a party before a product existed. So I'm well-acquainted with the fact that there was at least some sleaze in the first bubble.
I guess I'm crestfallen because I thought, at least over the past decade, that most of the sleaze would be in finance. I'm finding that not to be so.
I don't care about being a billionaire "master of the universe" as long as I don't have to be within 500 meters of the type of slime that does care about that shit. I just want to fucking work, to solve hard problems, to add value to the world, and to make enough money to have a good life. If I get rich, great. If I solve important problems and don't get rich, fine. That was the appeal of "tech" over finance, but now I see that the same sleaze has crept into our world too, and I want it out.
Here’s some shit I’ve either seen, or been credibly informed of, in the past 24 months, most of which was never in the news: no-poach agreements, attempted blacklisting of whistleblowers, a rescinded job offer based on a rumor that suggested PTSD, abuse of process within large companies, extortion of ex-employees, gross breaches of contract, frivolous lawsuits, threats of frivolous lawsuits, price fixing among venture capitalists, bait-and-switch hiring tactics, retaliatory termination, and fraudulent, no-product startups designed to embezzle angel investors.
I agree with the general principle, which I've summed up as: "fail fast" is often a cocktail-party excuse for reckless approaches to management.
To the OP: I'm relatively an echo chamber for the other comments here. The article qualifies as tl;dr; and would be much more effective with editing. However, I disagree with others that you go the journalism route; it's a blog, and journalism's standards of "we report, you decide" is about facts, not passion. That will turn some people off, but it won't be ambiguous about your intentions.
"fail fast" is often a cocktail-party excuse for reckless approaches to management.
Well said, and there are ethical reasons why this is unacceptable.
Tech demos are supposed to be scrappy. Minimum viable product. Twitter put up a fail whale early in its lifespan. So what? I don't think anyone's career relied on it being 100% reliable, and anyone who did bet his career on such a thing was being reckless. Twitter did the right thing by getting something good enough out there and iterating.
Management affects too many people for that approach to be tolerable. You have to actually know what you're doing before you act.
In an enviroment where people hate failure, the slogan "fail fast" can help to "tip de balance" to a more iterative and feedback-oriented kind of managment. BUT, when the balance has basically reached the other end, the "slogan" looses it's purpose (because people start failing "too much").
I liked this one especially: "On the other hand, a remnant of the flat-out elitist, aristocratic mindset that we have to kill the shit out of every couple hundred years (cf. French Revolution) is the concept that investors, socially speaking, deserve to outrank employees."
I completely agree with the sentiment, and appreciate the emotional tone.
Instead of a tl;dr summary, I think you could actually make a separate, short-attention-span style infographic with the salient points, and have a potent long-form as well.
Anyway, good piece! Its more important to keep writing than make every post perfect (its better to get a C in a class than never finish your A+ paper).
If you strip out some personal bitterness and spent some serious time with a scorched earth editor, this could be a very effective treatise on the state of ethics and corporate responsibility in the technology industry. You touch on some interesting concepts that deserve thought...
Alas, phrases like "snot-nosed kids", "Google's douche-tsunami" and "little sociopath" betray both personal bias and anger. Phrases like these make it too easy to dismiss this article as little more than a rant.
I believe that if you're going to call out an industry on ethics, you have to pursue the article as a journalist would. Keep your personal feelings under wraps, tell the whole story and leave the conclusions to your readers. When it comes to proving a point and convincing people to change, passionate journalism always trumps passion on its own.
As for phrases like "little sociopath", I want to call people to action on this sort of thing. I want people I've never met to call out and halt their own little sociopaths.
I call out Google because it was once a great company, and billions of dollars of value within in it has been destroyed by careerist middle managers who had no right to do so. I feel like Google is symbolic, because it was such a great company for so long. How on earth did a company go from being a cultural leader (in workplace progressivism) to using Jack Welch-style rank-and-yank in a couple of years?
Journalistic neutrality, on this sort of issue, either veers toward meaningless abstraction ("one model is...") or conservative fact-based concretion. I want to present the facts, but I also want to present, accurately, the more intangible (but no less real) ether of injustice between them.
As for phrases like "little sociopath", I want to call people to action on this sort of thing. I want people I've never met to call out and halt their own little sociopaths.
Don't try to be manipulative, just lay out your case; neutrality doesn't have to be the goal, but readability would be a plus. One easy place to start is by removing all sentences that include the pronoun "I".
What do you think caused the decline and when do you think it happened?
Most of my direct experiences are in New York. I've never spent more than a week at one time in the Valley.
I don't think I'm the only person to spot the problem. Most people are afraid it will hurt their careers to speak up about it. I'm not as worried, because I know that I'm talented (i'm not worried about blackballing myself) and someone has to do the "dirty" work of blowing the whistle.
My first whistle-blowing experience was at Google, which was odd because people (a) acknowledged that some of this shit had been going on for a long time, but (b) really didn't want to hear it. They wanted to ignore it and still believe in their Googley workplace utopia. I literally have thousands of people (from G.) who've never met me but think I'm a loose cannon because I blew a whistle on someone else they never met. The thing is, though: it's a whistle, not a gun, that I'm waving. If you don't do scummy shit, you don't need to worry.
I had a longer response, but I think the short response is that this is just the way the corporate world is.
Things were also different when Silicon Valley companies were smaller and unknown...people seemed to join tech because they liked it, not because it was cool or they wanted to be like Steve Jobs or Zuckerberg or whatever.
I think the folks that would benefit most from an improvement in ethics are likely to read this without taking away anything more constructive than new ways to 'position' themselves to folks who aren't sociopaths.
still worth talking about tho. ( and yeah, a bit long for a blog post, but only minutes to read.. some things take more than 140 characters )
I'm not writing this for the unethical people. I'm writing it for the marginally good people who are lazing about while the world burns.
I'm a believer in a 10/89/1 model of human morality. (These numbers are approximate.) The Good are 10%. The Bad are 1%. The Weak are 89%. The Good outnumber the Bad and one might expect them to win, but the Bad just as often win because they are willing to go further in their manipulation of the Weak.
Fundamentally I think we agree. Shepherds, sheep and wolves.
If you think you're dealing with a wolf at your level in the company, look up. Ultimately, what the executive allows, it endorses. Odds are they see a man cut from the same cloth, admire his drive, his self interest and and his hard-headedness. If he's still there in a year, I'd say he represents the company's core values.
