Hacker News Reader

Comment by baz00 | Hacker News Reader

From direct experience, instability and uncertainty less to your customers getting angry on twitter and fucking off rather quickly. All they want is to do what they did yesterday without being poked in the eye.

The whole move fast, break things and grow quickly is a cancer that compromises everything not a commercial win. When you put yourself before your customers you fucked up.

View on HN

At a practical level, this is NetBSD story is a story of a machine that just does it's job and doesn't change. For example, there is no active experimentation, no machine learning added on, etc. It's like a wood-mill; good that it make 2x4s but also not a highly dynamic business. Probably not a business that's seen a lot of competition or having to adapt to changing markets and products.

I'm not talking about breaking things and having downtime.

I'm saying that if you have the same infrastructure over 13 years, and you did not have to upgrade it, or replace its parts, or even migrate off it, you're likely not growing.

All the above things can be done with minimal disruption for the customers, ideally in a completely transparent way.

Perhaps you don’t need to grow? Growth is not the only business model. I mean failing to do maintenance is a sin of course but anything else, there is no one true course.

I originally answered to a comment about never becoming rich. No growth means not getting rich, this is what I'm trying to point at.

Of course growth and getting rich is not the only worthy target. Say, OSS is not about getting rich, but it's wonderful and worthy without doubt, in my eyes.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com