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Comment by merrywhether | Hacker News Reader

Wow, what a 2021!

It’s definitely never fun when increasing front-end engineering complexity becomes the band-aid for back-end shortcomings. Especially when things are still small enough where everybody should reasonably be able to contribute to anything if they can make improvements.

Sometimes you just want to be able to make choices based on instinct, forgoing deep analysis when you need to move fast and fully accepting that the wrong direction could be the end of the road for the project. But maybe the right choice would have been too; that’s the adrenaline rush of starting things and seeing what you can build. Good luck on this next step.

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> Sometimes you just want to be able to make choices based on instinct, forgoing deep analysis when you need to move fast and fully accepting that the wrong direction could be the end of the road for the project.

I've come to believe that this is why a lot of people are attracted to starting something of their own. While "bureaucracy" and "red tape" is indeed excessive and detrimental in many organizations, some amount of it is inevitable when an organization gets large and successful enough.

I think a lot of engineers never fully appreciate this. Listening to stakeholders and getting buy-in can make the process feel too slow, but the human components of product management and software development are important. Success usually isn't just about pushing code; it often depends on having listened to stakeholders, obtained buy-in, etc.

Of course, every entrepreneur is forced to understand this if their baby takes off because there are very, very few organizations that don't become slower and more bureaucratic when they achieve a certain level of success.

I don’t disagree at all, it’s just about difference phases of a business’ arc. Early on you take big risks and move quickly, optimizing for completely different things than when you’re further along and more established. And sometimes you’re happy to do the slower soft work of trying to turn a giant ship (case in point, this is my current position) but other times you just want to ride the ocean on a raft that you’re cobbling together from passing driftwood. Both approaches are terrible fits when attempted at the wrong phase of a company’s lifecycle, but that doesn’t mean a person can’t appreciate the different modes while understanding why the grass looks greener. (I also know that being total yolo to start something is a myth, but so is the idea that everything at a large established business should involve slow consensus-building).

“Predictable Success” is one of the few business books I recommend, not because it’s necessarily revelatory but rather because it verbalizes these concepts so well.

I really need to do a follow up post on this: "building safety nets"

If you plan ahead, risk can be contained to small enough spaces to make big experiments much safer. Had surprisingly good luck with this over the last year. Round is practically a ship of Theseus with how many parts I've gutted

Love seeing you here man, let's catch up soon

I caught this a few weeks ago, so it was funny seeing it pop up on here!

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