If it's a nice problem to have, don't solve it now | Hacker News Reader

If it's a nice problem to have, don't solve it now

davidnicholaswilliams.com

144 pointsdavnicwil69 comments

This can also be summarized as "Early on, don't be afraid of doing things that don't scale".

In this particular example, my "reset password" functionality could be sending me an email, and I have to reset the password manually and email you a temporary one that you can use. Bad solution? Yes. Doesn't scale? Of course. But if you have 5 customers it's not a big deal and you can use your time on something else.

The key here is to have good people in the team. A decent Senior Engineer / Architect would know that 'Reset password' will be needed. That is why a very technically solid person is gold in the first round, because they can design the signup in such a way that it's prepared for future requirements. They of course would also know that you can't store in plain text, that it should be hashed, that you might have to use a vault, that you need to randomize the hash, and that in the future limit access to the "user" table and never ever expose it through an endpoint where a user can reach it, as well as protecting against XSS and SQL injections.

Which of the list above goes off the list? There is a balance there in getting the right solution without scope creep, but also not implementing something so silly that it's going to get you into trouble later. The genius of a competent person is being able to tell what needs to be solved now vs. later

Yes! Scaling problems are extremely nice to have. May you be so blessed that all of your problems are scaling problems!

People spend so much time trying to preemptively solve scaling problems and proactively design around scale. I am being 100% serious when I say that this is an absolute total mistake. Scaling problems are just the absolute best to have, you shouldn't run away screaming from them before they happen. Twitter had the fail whale for years, you know what it didn't do? Tank the business. In scaling problems:

• You have money flowing in, and confidence that the thing is working.

• The load on the system has been dynamically adjusted down for you as your users have a suboptimal experience, giving you smaller messes to clean up.

• Often there is an expensive short-term solution to remove the egg on your face if so desired. You have one Really Important client who is pissed, you give them their own private app with twice the hardware until you can get this resolved, and now they love you for life because they see that you did backflips for them.

• You can profile the system. Complex systems, under instrumentation, literally tell you where to look for what is wrong. “Why is that taking 400ms?!”

• You can run side-by-side tests, clone the input from the stressed system to the new system and verify that the load has decreased while the underlying model is the same.

• Very often you will find logical bugs that you needed to fix anyway, they just become much more apparent when the system has high contention. Two things were implicitly ordered by time and thus did not break unless requests were concurrent, so they were doomed to break eventually, but now they break almost immediately.

• Your corporate overlords immediately understand the business value in getting the situation resolved “correctly” whereas convincing them of refactors usually takes time. “We got the system limping along for now but if we don’t fix the underlying issue soon then this will happen again.” “Well we are really happy with how explosively this product is going, I guess we can delay those other two apps while you fix up this one.”

• At the same time that license is not a license to dither, as usually happens with such speech. You feel committed to investigating and refactoring and fixing, with that time, because the uncertainty of the system is a sort of abstract menace exerting deadline pressure. It is legitimately exhilarating to figure out and fix the actual problems, and gives you a good feeling about your contribution.

This is why I would generally tell people to not start out a project with Kubernetes, for example. You are trying to up-front the cost of a scaling problem but that scaling problem is gonna be really nice to have. Do it later! Get some egg on your face.

There is an abstract reason too, which I should mention. Lots of systems die because they do not have a “revenue problem”—long term they will make enough money to cover their costs—but a “cashflow problem”—short-term they overcommit and run out of money. You fail to pay your employees on-time one month, and by the next month you find yourself potentially needing to spend time and money hiring new employees to replace the ones you just terrified. So you fail to deliver a functionality on-time and a new client chooses a competitor. Stuff like that. Can happen just because if you have N payments coming in the uncertainty of those payments can grow like √N while you keep only a constant buffer of cash-on-hand, but can happen in more elaborate ways. Almost always you can ease the pressure by deferring payments until the latest possible.

When I was planning my wedding, my wife wanted to pay everything as soon as possible to save on our mental load; I resisted. And that was clutch because there were times during this when we were saying “ok we got $100 left to cover food and gas this week before I get paid on Friday, what can we do with that?” where if we had up-fronted those costs, presumably we would have unnecessarily eaten ramen or less for the three weeks before. Like it is easy to say “here is what we can save per month, so this is a reasonable budget for the wedding that won’t kill us”—solving the revenue problem. But cashflow problems still exist even when you know that you will be able to cover the cost eventually. Solving a scaling problem is up-fronting a cost that can easily be delayed and if you don’t delay it then there is a very real chance that your project can be canned way before you run into that scaling problem.

Especially let me link @jackdied’s talk “Stop Writing Classes” where this is a theme,

https://youtu.be/o9pEzgHorH0

Something something like “They subclassed a dict. Because they might need to add some functionality to it later. You know what? You can just do that later!” Same with scaling problems. This won’t scale, but we’ll worry about that later. And then when we worry about that, we will know by measurement whether our shiny new cloud machines need to be RAM-optimized or CPU-optimized or whether they need to be cheap-as-possible-but-ten-times-as-many-of-them. Whereas if you up-front this cost you literally are making all of your scaling decisions based on zero data and hunches.

Agreed about scaling problems, but the examples you provided illustrate that, in my experience, there are still things you should be doing from the get-go.

Building things that don't scale is often taken to the extreme where it's nothing more than a few HTML pages strung together by self-rolled crypto and javascript. This might be good for idea validation (first couple of days), but it shouldn't persist past this point.

Understanding when the inevitable problems pop up and being able to solve them in reasonable enough time not to lose your users is - to me - not a nice to have problem. It's a showstopper that will turn egg on your face problems into fatalities.

Few things I would recommend are:

* Instrumentation - You don't need to go full ELK before you find product-market fit. Hell you can log everything, and with two users you can always read all the logs. But something is key. * Up and down scripts - How long will it take you to set up a new copy of the product? Do you have to trawl bash logs and have a team meeting to find out all the configs that need to be set up? * Load-testing - Again, nothing fancy. Just put curl on a bash loop and see where the system starts to hiccup. Once you have real users with complex data on real hardware you'll wish you profiled things, even slightly. * Instrumentation - I say it again because the sheer number of systems I've found on the verge of silent failure and user frustration because the errors weren't being propagated, be it from client side to server or from the logs to an alert, is massive. With modern SPAs it's easy to think everything works when all your users see is a blank page. * Please don't roll your own crypto. Unless you're working in a language that is 2 days old you really shouldn't need to or be doing this.

In short, if you're using HPAs and Kubernetes you've gone too far. But don't choose your instance size at random, be able to set up a new instance in an hour, and have at least 60% confidence that if there is an error you will know about it.

A decent eng will know that there are managed solutions for this problem that you don't have to build yourself.

In 2020, with the number of managed solutions out there for simple CRUD functionality, the default should be just using the managed thing until it doesn't suit you, not just ignoring critical yet non-unique pieces of infrastructure all together.

Not necessarily. If you have 0 customers but your MVP already depends on a bunch of external services, you have hard lock-ins or running costs from the beginning. Scaling and putting everything on scalable infra should be reserved for projects that make it past a couple of paying customers (= validation).

Don't be penny-wise and pound foolish though. Let's pretend I take a month to design, pick, configure, operationalize, and integrate with the project, a pub/sub bus that will cost $0 while it's not running by developing it as VMs on hardware I own. A hypothetical alternative costs $x/month for the first Y billion messages. If I'll never exceed 1,000 messages/month, having a hard rule to avoid running costs would argue for taking a month to build such a system.

A more pragmatic approach involves examining X and Y before deciding not to pay any money. (They're also different for everybody, and it also depends on your financial situation.) If X is less than the cost of 1 coffee from a local coffee shop, I personally would pay for it rather than spend the month building my own $0 monthly unused cost pubsub bus for 1 month.

(Time it takes to implement is a 3rd variable, Z, though I'll note that estimating software project is notoriously difficult to get right.)

Reality is nowhere near this rosy. Sure, maybe you can get away with canned auth, but I took that as illustrative.

A more practical example: Start/stop/change subscription plans. Until 12 days ago, Stripe had no customer portal so you had to implement this yourself. You can do it with support email, and "easy to switch plans" is not on any prospective customer's checklist.

"Too many change plan emails" is a good problem to have - deprioritize the feature. And if you're lucky, by the time you really need it, your billing service will have implemented the feature for you.

> That is why a very technically solid person is gold in the first round, because they can design the signup in such a way that it's prepared for future requirements. They of course would also know that you can't store in plain text, that it should be hashed, that you might have to use a vault, that you need to randomize the hash, and that in the future limit access to the "user" table and never ever expose it through an endpoint where a user can reach it, as well as protecting against XSS and SQL injections.

Wrong. The correct technical decision is to bundle in a library that solves this for you - login with Google, or Facebook, or GitHub, or OIDC, pick one according to the context. Get password reset, MFA, password security, etc. for free.

Why reinvent the wheel, poorly?

I think this was an example based on the op example.

The thing is, that's not just a technical decision. There are strategy, product, and operational reasons why you might decide to add or avoid SSO. SSO for sign-on can be really complicated and have lots of caveats -- for example, Apple requires any app with any SSO option to also support sign in with Apple, or be removed from the app store. Or you may want to restrict certain SSO to enterprise customers only, as a feature, but not have any of them yet. Or your users might have privacy concerns about SSO, or not have accounts at your SSO providers.

Any of these things may or may not be relevant to your decision, and I know that authentication is a specific example within a larger point. What I'm trying to say is that it's never correct to say "<x> is the right approach for all <y> trying to do <z>". Every decision has consequences, and what really matters is your ability to foresee those consequences and weigh them against the broader strategic picture of what you're trying to accomplish.

Assuming that Google or Facebook or Github has implemented a library correctly, and that it will remain available as long as you want your app to function is dangerous.

As opposed to assuming that you'll implement it correctly when Google or Facebook or github haven't?

Yes, because what's good for them is not necessarily what's good for you.

> In this particular example, my "reset password" functionality could be sending me an email, and I have to reset the password manually and email you a temporary one that you can use.

That's exactly what I just did at the soon-to-launch startup I'm currently working at. There is a change password function, but no password reset (or other systems that would require generating stateful links for emailed). As an added bonus, if you try to sign up with an email address that is already in use, the automated email you receive (from an address monitored by a human) includes something to the effect of "If you aren't sure of your password, reply to this email and we'll get it straightened out."

The problem with issues like this is that this is patch development. If you don't look a couple steps ahead and at least think through your "nice to have" problems, you might end up getting the architecture wrong. The password reset problem might drive you to find an authentication library instead of rolling your own. Suddenly, your "nice to have" problem is fixed before you get to it, because you decided to look at the larger picture instead of just rushing to just rely on an email and password column in your MVP. That way when you demo your app to an investor or early beta users, you won't be stuck saying "oh, there's no password reset, just create another one".

This is a great point. It's important to be mindful of the path dependence you are creating for your future self. At any point in time, I think you can roughly bucket problems into three categories:

1. This is a blocking issue now.

2. This is not a block issue now, but postponing will cause more pain than we would save by not doing it now.

3. This is not a blocking issue and doesn't create future pain.

The third bucket are natural to postpone. Finding the balance between the first two is one of the primary challenges of engineering.

I think there is a 4th category: This is not an obviously blocking issue right now, but it creates enough mental load that it prevents my work from being rewarding.

I'm curious, what's the right alternative to having an email and password columns in a "customers" table?

As one example, Django's auth framework gives you a users table which it manages. You would set a foreign key column from customers to users.

I believe the point of GP was to say "use an auth framework". If you're rolling your own auth, then your approach is fine.

In addition to the sibling answer of "use a framework"; if you simply stick passwords in a database, and the database gets stolen, you've now leaked your users' passwords. So you should hash the passwords, and they should be salted, so now you need a `salt` column. Most people use too cheap a hash function, so this is an additional argument for using a library / framework.

Umm, but using bcrypt to hash the passwords is just a couple of lines of code (at least in Go); I'm wondering if I'm doing things wrong by not using a dedicated framework.

No, that's fine :) It wasn't clear to me from your original comment whether you were hashing passwords, apologies.

As a minor nit, most salted password hash algorithms store the salt at the start (usually) or end (occasionally) of the hash, so you don't need a separate column. You end up with two functions: one to generate a new password hash (which securely generates a salt as well), and one to compare a plain-text password with the (salt+hash).

One alternative is to use something like Keycloak or some other auth tech.

Then you'll have password recovery, 2FA, sign in with FB/Goog/LinkedIn etc., loads of insightful management screens and even SAML support for enterprise SSO - all free, out of the box, battle-hardened and already in wide use with many eyes on it for security.

Then when your customer waves some IT checklist in front of you asking you "do you support blah blah password complexity" the answer is just YES.

The TFA has a solid point, but has picked a bad example to illustrate it. These days if you find yourself even thinking about building your own password recovery, even way off in the future, you should really reexamine your core decisions.

Cognito is a popular auth service that's used by many people who want to launch an MVP on AWS, for example. You would not keep the password yourself at that point.

Later on you might realize that you've bound your user ID to email and that you need to use UUID, where email is just a contact address.

You might even want to have users have multiple accounts that use the same email address.

You might decide to bind the user's account to their phone number instead.

It's not about One True Strategy, but about looking further into what you will need in the future. You might decide not to develop something right away, but you can avoid much refactoring later by making a smart decision now that did not involve any more work than the less smart decision.

Definitely.

People who think their problems are small or simple write their own libraries, and then every change in requirements gets incorporated into the library or blamed on the victim. By the time the system is profitable you've reimplemented half of a robust library, badly.

My instinct is to agree with you, but with my practical instinct-taming hat on, I reckon you could have between thousands and tens of thousands of monthly active users (depending on demographic - how likely they are to need reset) before taking a phone call to reset it manually in db would be burdensome.

And between 0 and that many users you could have all sorts of other reasons for rethinking your authentication architecture, nevermind whether home grown or third-party library.

As a person who has worked at many startup, I get it, "shipping" features is important.

As an engineer working at many startups, this is a sad and painful reality of working under product driven ideas and "first to market" type things- basically anything that doesn't (usually) involve life or death, or federal regulation is rushed out the door when it can be.

As a user, I absolutely 100% hate this mentality. You skip features you don't consider necessary, do things in ways that make them difficult to return to later and throw it in the "technical debt" pile.

I think the "ship asap" is necessary for brand new startups. If you can't generate the user growth necessary to secure the next round of funding you'll be out of business, and that time spent writing the ideal code was not only a waste of time, but also a potential cause to the slow user growth. In its first year or so, until it receives enough funding to stabilize, it makes sense for a startup to give more weight to the short term than the medium term.

But once stabilized, and there's no immediate danger of running out of runway, things shift, and the medium and long terms become much more significant. But many startups fail to realize this; they've become too accustomed to the fast-paced, ship-asap mentality. Breaking from it seems to them a decline in productivity, where it's actually just a shift in priorities. There are a lot of contributing factors to this oversights, and they can vary from company to company, but it's continuing to prioritize the short-term is a dangerous act that usually serves neither the end user nor the business.

Yes. But if you're not meeting user expectations they're not going to tell anyone, and so and so on. The satisfaction of current users has to factor in some where. Else no word of mouth, and expensive churn.

> ideal code

One problem in these discussions is that people quickly start using absolutist language, which makes it hard to find balance.

Balance also is not quite the correct thing to strive for.

The proper course of action is to work with the leadership to figure out when the expected critical points are for the business. This includes fund raising, IPOs, acquisition, or any other time when the company receives a valuation. The goal, for both the business and the dev team, is to make sure that the company has the best possible value at those exact points. You don't want to peek too early or peek too late. The proper course of action then is to prioritize things in accordance with how they impact those points in time. If one's coming up soon, prioritize the short term almost exclusively. If it's years out, plan ahead as a marathon, not a sprint.

Know the enemy, but also know thyself.

For example, it would be a bad idea for me to say "I am not going to write any automated tests" for a 3-week MVP. That decision would lead to me producing nothing.

Just to push back a tiny bit on this, sometimes nice problems can turn into nasty problems very quickly.

"My customer data isn't backed up", is a nice problem to have when you're just launching a new service and don't have any customers. But it's still a problem you'd probably like to solve relatively early. There won't be a moment where missing backups are an immediate problem but also still easily solvable; they're either a future problem or you're unavoidably about to lose a large number of your customers.

As a less on-the-nose example, sometimes when I'm building software, I can anticipate that something will be a problem two or three months from now. In those cases, I have a decision to make. If the code is disposable, I can ignore the problem and solve it later. But if I'm working on core architecture, spending an extra 2-3 days to solve the problem now can save me 3 weeks of refactoring in the future.

Many businesses start agile and become slow and cumbersome over time precisely because of this reason. They can't keep up the pace they started at because the technical debt, compliance issues, and future problems end up weighing them down over time.

I think there's just a balance to be had here.

"My customer data is too big to back up with an rsync cron job" is a nice problem to have.

"My customer data isn't backed up" is a stupid problem to have, and if your friends and coworkers aren't stopping you, then you need a better class of friends.

No don't you see! If you get sued for misusing your customer's data, that means you have customers! So getting sued is actually a good thing!

Make your money and burn down the building on your way out!

I think that this advice cannot be generalized. There are companies with large development teams spending staggering amounts of time solving problems they don't have and probably never will and companies burning through whatever goodwill they can find to extract maximum profit by throwing garbage, buggy, and incomplete software out into the market "because agile". Almost no one gets this right. I think the two sides feed off each other by each pointing to the other as an example.

This is good, difficult advice. I'm working on an app, and it's so easy to go off the feature deepend. I recently spent a week trying to do data import/export - an un-requested feature by my 20 users. That time almost certainly would have been better spent marketing or otherwise finding more users.

Nice to have today, executive demand tomorrow. What's important is not to solve tomorrow's problems today, but to not inhibit tomorrow's solutions today either.

Whilst I'm building signup, I realise that I probably also need reset password functionality. If a user signs up, but then forgets their password, that's a problem. But from my perspective right now, is this a nice problem to have? Actually, yes! I have zero users, but having this problem implies I would have users, which would be great. Reset password functionality is important, and will absolutely be required eventually, but I can do it later. First, I should ship anything that's stopping me from getting users in the first place.

While I'm all for building minimum viable products, I would argue that a login process that does not have a password reset function is too minimal to be viable. If you're so strapped for time that you can't build a password reset form while you're building your user sign-up form, I would ask why you're bothering with building your own sign-up functionality at all. Why not use OpenID or OAuth based logins that bypass the need for building a sign-up system at all?

As a user, I would be hesitant to sign up for a product that didn't have password-reset functionality, and, if I discovered that the service I just signed up for has no way to reset a password, I would probably stop using it (since I lost my password and have no way of resetting) and disrecommend it to people who ask me about it.

The password thing was just an illustrative example, it's not perfect, but the point isn't that you don't need it or that not having it won't be really bad when you have users, it's that whilst you don't have users perhaps there are other things that are higher priority to build first.

When those are done, reset password might literally be the next item on your list. You might end up building and shipping it before anyone signs up anyway, but in the meantime you've at least got something out there and had the opportunity of getting any users at all.

I think your approach is underestimating the reputational cost of a half-baked product. I've seen this with a few products, most recently Roam. I see a product with an intriguing concept, I try it out, and I discover there are some fairly severe limitations. In the case of Roam, it was not having a great way to export data. I then put down the product, and, in all likelihood, I won't go back. In addition, I've pointed out this limitation to several friends of mine who had expressed interest, and at least two of them have stated that it was a deal-breaker for them, and that they were significantly less likely to use Roam as a result.

To go back to your point, was "lack of export functionality" a "nice problem to have"? Arguably, yes. You don't have to worry about exporting data until you have users entering data, right? But, as Microsoft found out way back when it was building Word, users won't come to your system unless they know they can get their data back out again to share with others. [1] So just like Word's market share only really took off when it was able to write WordPerfect files, I predict that Roam will remain, at best, a curiosity until they implement an export system that allows the user to take his or her notes and use them in a different application.

Instead of thinking about problems in terms of what prevents users from signing up, or what prevents users from using the product, it's better to think about problems in terms of what prevents users from accomplishing the tasks this product is supposed to help them accomplish. In the case of Roam, the lack of export functionality (which at first might seem like a triviality) is actually a big deal, because the utility of a personal knowledgebase is significantly diminished if there isn't an easy way to get all the knowledge back out of it again. As a result, lots products in that space (not just Roam) suffer from marginal adoption because while it's easy for a user to sign up, it's much less obvious that the product is worth investing any significant time or effort into learning and using.

[1] https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/06/03/strategy-letter-ii...

And data security will come exactly: never. Because security is never the most important thing. A company that runs with this mentality will always be reactive, and never prepared for threats.

Security is foundational. It's not something to add later. Without it, signup is not done and shouldn't be shipped. Ironically, not having the reset password functionality actually reduces security bug surface area :-)

Which is an argument in favor of leaving off some features. Don't half-ass password reset. Wait until you have the need to whole-ass it and make things conceptually-coherent.

One must always consider opportunity cost. Adding password reset functionality might take time away from building features that solve true end user problems. People will wait for a password reset, they won't wait if you cannot deliver true value to them.

I take a different attitude to "nice to have" problems. I work on a professional services team that is massively undersized relative to demand. Our role is less than a year old within the organization. We have far more clients in need of support from my team than we can give.

This is a great problem to have - lots of pent up demand. Nevertheless, it is a problem, and we must actively strive to solve it. It's nice to have lots of demand, yet if the problem is not solved, we will be giving up future revenue. A larger team will be able to support more revenue than a smaller team.

There is no part of this situation where it is a good idea to slow down on hiring, or to compromise on hiring standards.

Ninja edit: this is in contrast to things that aren't a problem yet. E.g., in the article, the author discusses not having password reset functionality. That is not yet a problem in the absence of users. It's not a nice problem to have. It is not a problem.

>Ninja edit: this is in contrast to things that aren't a problem yet. E.g., in the article, the author discusses not having password reset functionality. That is not yet a problem in the absence of users. It's not a nice problem to have. It is not a problem.

That's the crux of it. The headline is catchy, but the author isn't talking about nice-to-have problems. He's talking about recognizing if something is a problem right now, or only a problem at some point in the future.

IMO, the article is click-bait.

Short, information dense, titles are hard :-)

The full question I ask is "From my perspective right now, is this a nice problem to have?" - emphasis on the first part.

I certainly didn't mean for this to be click bait, just wanted to share something that's been valuable for me with others in the hope it might be useful. I might work on the title.

If you're looking for unsolicited suggestions, you might consider "If it's not a problem yet, don't solve it now".

> It's not a nice problem to have. It is not a problem.

I think you misunderstand his word usage, though you're seemingly following the same process.

A "nice problem to have" is one that results from having success. Yes, he doesn't have the problem now, because he's got no users, so indeed, having to reset the passwords of existing users would be a "nice to have" problem.

You're already in the "nice to have" zone (clients with problems to solve!), and you want to fix those problems brought on by popularity.

Yes, spot on, this was what I wanted to get across. Thanks.

I fully agree with everything GP said, by their understanding of what I meant. But yeah, to be useful the question has to be forward looking. Would things have to change for the better for this problem to actually manifest.

It's a matter of tense. I think we're all agreeing in this sub-thread.

I am focusing (perhaps too much) on the tense issues. Without tense, "no password reset mechanism", to continue using the same example, represents a problem state.

If something is a problem, it exists in the present.

If something will be a problem, with any contingency or timeline, then by definition it is not yet a problem.

Even in your own phrasing, the tense issue becomes clear:

> Yes, he doesn't have the problem now, because he's got no users, so indeed, having to reset the passwords of existing users would be a "nice to have" problem.

Specifically "... would be a "nice to have" problem." This indicates that it is not a problem, rather that it can become a problem.

This can be used to justify any kind of crap being shipped in newly introduced features, merely baring regressions.

Therefore I don't value the approach as presented here. But a sane variant could be interesting: anyway I suspect it will need domain specific judgment, preventing from throwing a nice universal rule of thumb to the world.

The glorification of technical debt.

A 'good problem to have' is 'we need to scale to handle another 1 million users', not missing basic functionality.

I deleted my older comment.

For many "nice problems to have" I really disagree.

A nice problem to have can be a real problem. It's nice you are in that situation but it's still a problem.

Your site offline because of demand is a nice problem to have. It's absolutely one to solve right now.

They are discussing nice problems to have relative to the status quo, so problems that are really only potential problems right now, but could become actual problems if good things happened. So I think even with the rewrite, your comment misses the mark.

OTOH, I think that it's still a bit wrong to say don't solve them now: if you have a problem that is potentially a business-ending disaster that you won't have time to fix before it destroys your business if it manifests, it doesn't matter if the conditions which would cause it to manifest are otherwise an improvement over your status quo conditions. It still needs fixed before that happens.

Otherwise, yeah, YAGNI applies.

Yeah, your first paragraph is spot on. It's pretty much exactly what I was going to reply to IanCal. Instead I'll just +1 it.

On your second paragraph, 100% agreed. This is really just a useful prioritization heuristic, not a rule, and in some cases other considerations should and will override it.

It's mainly useful just to deliberately and routinely check that instinct to go deep on whatever you're working on when there's a lot of breadth to cover that's more important to get done first.

Whether the problem is nice to have or not is entirely orthoganal to how important it is to solve.

"Is this feature important, or a nice to have" is the question they want, not "is this problem nice to have?".

Nice problem to have is just the wrong phrase because it really means something orthoganal to "problems that I should solve now".

> nice problems to have relative to the status quo, so problems that are really only potential problems right now, but could become actual problems if good things happened

But that's not what this very common phrase means.

What they want to say is "nice to haves".

>"It's good advice, but hard to follow in practice. Often when you explore solutions to a problem, even simple ones, the problem reveals itself to be more complex than you'd anticipated. You find sub-problems, and tangental problems, which look just as important as the original. It's easy to go off track and end up deep into the problem you were supposed to just find a quick solution to. After all, it's just one more thing, you're thinking about it, and you'll have to solve it at some point anyway. Why not now?

I've made this mistake a lot. I'm trying to get better at being strict about saying "not now" to new problems that I discover in the middle of an iteration, and avoid getting sidetracked from shipping by working on things that can be left for later. I'd like to share a tactic I use to do this that has worked well for me. It's to ask a simple question about each new problem I encounter: "From my perspective right now, is this a nice problem to have?". If yes, I skip it. If no, I work on it immediately."

Opinion: There is great value to persisting problems that can be instantaneously or quickly solved, if only for the simple reason that they can be thought about; meditated upon; and other/better/more novel/more creative/more elegant solutions devised -- than the one initially determined by one's mind...

In fact, if in the future, I built a large company, and solved all known business problems (well, in that business's industry!), then I'd probably want to get rid of that company and start over again with nothing!

Why?

Well to again rethink/reengineer better solutions -- to the problem set that I once faced as barriers!

You will always think more creatively the second (and nth) times you revisit problems and problem sets!

This might sound crazy to most normal people -- but I value problem solving skills over money.

With problem solving skills, you can always get money -- but the reverse is not always true...

Anyway, excellent article!

Having too many customers trying to buy your stuff is something folks would call a "nice problem to have"

It's a TERRIBLE problem to have not addressed in advance because now you're loosing money and people may wander off.

almost everything folks call "a nice problem to have" is not really "nice". It's frequently business hurting and sometimes business killing.

If you have no end-users, then deficiencies in your product won't cause any actual problems. (points at head)

Does anyone else feel like we are all trying to be high growth startups?

I understand that we all want to build products which others use and pay for but why not also be building things for yourself?

Is it really such a bad thing to spend some time over-optimizing pieces of a system for your own pleasure and possibly learning things along the way?

I'd say this is more relevant for (customer facing) features and not so much for (technical and architectural) problems.

Work on the most important features first but find the middle ground between some spaghetti that just works and an over engineered system.

I think this is great advice, but hard to apply or understand if you‘ve never actually had nice-to-have problems. I can totally relate to those rabbit-hole kind of problems that only feed the procrastinator in me.

> I can totally relate to those rabbit-hole kind of problems

Exactly the mechanism that this question aims to address!

Obviously it's just an example, but should most new companies just avoid building login entirely and use something like Auth0, AWS Cognito, Firebase Auth, etc?

You should definitely do SSO from some other service if you can.

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