The recent post by Daniel Tanner on how to be relentlessly resourceful, and Joel's long favoured essay on "smart and gets things done" seems fine when resourceful means "smile and make a couple of phonecalls", but it fails somewhere on the gradient up to where this post discusses changes at Amazon. Steve Yegge seems both 'smart' and 'gets things done', yet he wrote this post on how difficult changes can be, and how many they regularly turned away at Amazon. I think the "smart and gets things done" meme is really saying don't stop so soon.
Our laws grandfather in certain accepted behaviours which would be enormously difficult to retro-fit. Can you imagine trying to get gas (petrol)-fuelled vehicles going if they weren't allowed already? Driving tankers full of explosive fuel on public roads to gas stations on every corner where it will be kept in big tanks underground and pumped by untrained people into vehicles easily up to 25 years old maintained on an ad-hoc basis...
Our systems and businesses behave in the same way, too. As a startup you can get away with anything you can get away with. Had no backups for the first year? Ha ha, that was lucky, eh? Ran on a friend's server for 6 months? Left some customer details on a laptop that was stolen? Good thing you were small enough that nobody picked up on it and it made no scandal and caused no problems. Billing done mostly from one person's head? When you get bigger, you can't do that. Which means just starting a project becomes many times harder.
I think we overlook this effect quite a lot on dicussions on HN, where big companies are considered slow moving because they are inefficient and bureaucratic, whereas really, a lot of said "bureaucracy" covers things we want the companies we deal with to handle properly.
As Daniel's post said, as a consultant his task was to 'do the impossible'. I suspect quite a bit of this comes from being able to drop enough "important" "must have" requirements to be able to get moving again.
Our laws grandfather in certain accepted behaviours which would be enormously difficult to retro-fit. Can you imagine trying to get gas (petrol)-fuelled vehicles going if they weren't allowed already? Driving tankers full of explosive fuel on public roads to gas stations on every corner where it will be kept in big tanks underground and pumped by untrained people into vehicles easily up to 25 years old maintained on an ad-hoc basis...
Our systems and businesses behave in the same way, too. As a startup you can get away with anything you can get away with. Had no backups for the first year? Ha ha, that was lucky, eh? Ran on a friend's server for 6 months? Left some customer details on a laptop that was stolen? Good thing you were small enough that nobody picked up on it and it made no scandal and caused no problems. Billing done mostly from one person's head? When you get bigger, you can't do that. Which means just starting a project becomes many times harder.
I think we overlook this effect quite a lot on dicussions on HN, where big companies are considered slow moving because they are inefficient and bureaucratic, whereas really, a lot of said "bureaucracy" covers things we want the companies we deal with to handle properly.
As Daniel's post said, as a consultant his task was to 'do the impossible'. I suspect quite a bit of this comes from being able to drop enough "important" "must have" requirements to be able to get moving again.