Comment by jamie_ca | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jamie_ca | Hacker News Reader

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Yes, it's more time overall, but that's not the point.

From the example in the article, if it would take them 2 months to build a robust email delivery system or 2 weeks to put a temporary hack in place, it could be worthwhile to the business to do the hack if it means they can start user-testing 6 weeks earlier.

Also, if they're still in the product-fit stage of their business development, they might find that the product isn't as useful/worthwhile as they thought, and scrap it after 2 weeks testing. This would allow 6 weeks of overall developer effort to be spent on another initiative.

Just because you know that developing throwaway code is waste, doesn't mean it's necessarily a bad business decision.

Is it worth the while when you have to spend more than weeks to do it right later? Again, in general it is not. You are citing a very, very specific business reason as a justification. In 99% of all cases, no good business reason exists to waste more money later. Essentially, this is what you are asking. In your example, it's either 8 weeks total to do it right in the first pass or 10+x weeks total to do it right later when you have the still unquantified extra overhead of not breaking stuff that has been built around the insufficient solution.

That is actually the point of the metaphor. Taking on debt without a clear business reason is supposed to sound bad.

Not all spending is wasteful, even when, in an ideal scenario, it could be avoided.

You have to look at it differently: if you hack something in two weeks, you will:

- be able to switch to other, more important tasks more quickly;

- allow the business to better discover what the actual requirements are while they have an MVP solution in place.

Resources are finite: you only have a limited number of engineers, and the business needs to be moving forward. This approach allows you to do so, while mitigating a lot of risks at the same time.

The costs are not lost: they bring back business value in terms of fast progress, and mitigates risks.

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