As much as I want to believe the opposite to be true as a “power user”, good tools often force you to adopt better practices, not the other way around.
As much as I want to believe the opposite to be true as a “power user”, good tools often force you to adopt better practices, not the other way around.
Just wanted to highlight this excellent statement. It's like having a strict type system that enforces certain rules are always met. It provides consistency and predictability.
> rethink their recruitment processes
This context is relevant to the kind of software system that was needed. To improve their processes, it was necessary to impose an explicit top-down order to the existing mess.
Malleable software, on the other hand, feels more suited for personal computing, greenfield projects, or small teams with members working independently as well as collaboratively. Particularly in the early stages of product R&D, strict rules can be a source of friction in the creative process.
Strict better practices and well-designed tools are discovered and developed through open and flexible explorations, as a kind of distillation of knowledge and experience.
Our biggest value was getting customers to remove all the extra questions on their applications that had built up over years of management changes that no one had any idea why they were even asking.
But we started as a "boutique" company that implemented everything requested by our then small number of clients (mainly out of desperation, we were self-funded and we didn't have much leeway, we needed those clients). It was as flexible as it gets before the LLM times.
But after a while, you start noticing patterns, an understanding of what works and what doesn't in a given context. Our later customers rarely requested a feature that we didn't already have or we didn't have a better alternative of. It's not like we had a one-size-fits-all solution that we forced on everyone. We offered a few alternative ways of working that fit different contexts (hiring an airline pilot is a very different context than hiring a flight attendant). And in time, this know-how started to become our most important value proposition.
At some point we even started joking about leaving the software business and offering recruitment consulting services instead.
Malleable software enables infinite variations of tools when the correct number is in the single digits.