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Comment by munificent | Hacker News Reader

I think there is a lot of truth to both your comment and the parent comment.

Everyone underestimates the complexity of systems they aren't personally familiar with. Ask the average person how many parts are in a modern automobile and they'd probably guess too low by an order of magnitude.

But it is also true that large organizations get weird when money is easily available. You get a Cambrian explosion where without selection pressure to ensure people and teams do real, useful work, everything starts to seem like a good idea.

Determining which organizational complexity is essential and which is accidental is likely the quintessential hard problem of business.

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This is a very nice description of what I've noticed moving to a large organisation. There is also a lot of busy work. As the organisation grows, communicating and negotiating between groups requires extra effort that often ends up being the role of a new management level, and groups have self-preserving incentives to stay relevant leading to lots of entropy (busy work, repeated work, hero projects that are just there for internal branding). As someone who has recently been put in this level of management I spend a lot of time having to negotiate out of new project initiatives invented more to attract exec attention or satisfy a rogue execs dream project. Makes me really look forward to moving back to working in a smaller company.

> Determining which organizational complexity is essential and which is accidental is likely the quintessential hard problem of business.

Three questions.

(1) "What would the impact on our business be if we built the best possible, state of the art feature here?"

(2) "What would the impact on our business be if we half-assed a solution in a quarter of the time?"

(3) "What would the impact on our business be if we utterly failed?"

(Usually, the different between 1 & 2 is negligible. Sometimes, between 1 & 3. Don't ask people to justify success. Ask them to justify why we should spend any more time than slightly-above-failure.)

Those questions assume an existing framework where "the feature", "state of the art", "half-assed", and "failed" are all well-defined. But my experience is that the framing itself is most of where the challenge lies.

You end up with team A who wants to add the feature, team B who thinks it's an anti-feature, team C who thinks the entire application where feature lives should be scrapped, PM D who says users can already accomplish what the feature does using existing features, UX design E who says the fact that users are still asking for the feature means all those other features must be poorly designed and we should fix those...

That second paragraph summarized the last 5 years of my professional career.

In my experience, I've always listened to the last UX design E guy. Every time we worked on what he said the users asked for, we did well..

The problems caused by "half-assed" solutions are likely somewhere down the line, in distant future and their true costs impossible to estimate.

Anything less than perfection will incure avoidable future costs, and perfection approaches infinite time to deliver.

Ergo, standing in the present, one should do ones best to estimate future costs and decide what percent of perfection seems optimal.

In reality, when asked to self-estimate, too many teams (and especially naive PMs) select perfection as the optimal approach.

Every tech company thinks they’ll just build their own CRM until they try.

See also: build systems and UI frameworks.

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