Comment by taneq | Hacker News Reader

Comment by taneq | Hacker News Reader

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> Many C-level executives want "true business agility" for their company: They want to be able to react quickly when circumstances change.

True, and this isn't a bad goal in and of itself, but what they don't realise is that these 'quick reactions' (aka fundamental low level changes in the product) may require orders of magnitude more work than said executives expect (and in fact, probably the work required is at least linear in the age of the company).

> (they do not have a war chest yet, so those that were not able to react quickly do not exist anymore)

I'd argue that having a 'war chest' is actually detrimental to agility (if you're thinking of agility as 'the ability to perform at our current level in a different field'). Small new companies can pivot extremely fast because even if it means throwing away their whole codebase, they've only lost a few months' work.

> I'd argue that having a 'war chest' is actually detrimental to agility [...]

I believe that's what the parent is saying as well. I read it as saying that larger companies with a 'war chest' are able to weather the problems caused by reacting more slowly, and so agility is not as highly prioritized, while smaller, newer companies have to react quickly or die.

To be fair, many "low level" technical decisions also cost orders of magnitude more than was originally intended.

Not coincidentally, there is rarely strong strategic technical direction at the organization level. Rarely is there accountability (especially for middle management) in making sure that cobol is actually deprecated, those Windows XP boxes are actually powered down, and that gnarly business logic is cleaned up and well-tested.

It's worth noting that typically there's collusion from all levels to create one of those problems. That being said, there's not much an individual contributor can do about massive strategic mistakes other than move to another org. A magical org with great engineers and no major technical debt.

"War chest" kind of implies liquid assets of some kind. Code is a highly illiquid asset and even a liability if you have to maintain its existing functionality.

Most of the small companies that are able to pivot easily do have reasonably large war chests in the form of VC funding. If they don't have that kind of funding they won't be able to pivot as easily because they need to worry about maintaining cash flow just to keep the lights on.

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