The F-35A was fine, it was mostly the B that clusterfucked the project. Again, if we're talking about incentive problems, those are just straightforwardly co-ordination problems.
13,002 karma · joined October 8, 2008
I've done so much startup stuff I'm equally bad at all of it.
I currently work coaching Founders globally from a base in Singapore: https://coaching.figuringshitout.com/
I formerly was a 3x Founder and have worked in Engineering, Design, Product & Growth.
I also have a background in Computer Vision (designed a single camera 3D tracking algorithm), Augmented Reality (Designed a AR prototype for FEMA to manage disaster response workers), Tabletop/Touch Computing (Studied how people's collaborative behaviors change when put under time pressure), HCI (Studied it for 4 years), Interaction Design (ditto) and am well read in Psychology (esp. Social Psych), Economics, & other random trivia.
I also cook... a lot.
Again, all speculation but the point is how a defined end point allowed teams to receive clarity over tradeoffs and move quickly. It's very typical of how Apple works (which you can see in Vision 1.0 where certain things were wildly overspecified and other were wildly under for that reason). The exact details may be wrong but the logic of how they got to this place feels right.
Having the clarity over what's important allows teams to perform rather than endlessly debate over tradeoffs.
Reading the story behind the story, I think what happened is that several years ago, Apple execs were looking at a range of plausible technologies that were becoming feasible and were trying to find some kind of coherence among them through the story they wanted to tell. The story that was really speaking to them, as Gruber identified [1], was that finally the professional and consumer market were about to merge in really interesting ways.
I think what happened was at that point in time, they decided that the iPhone 15 Pro was going to be used to film the keynote for the iPhone 15 Pro and that this was the target given to all teams to give them clarity and focus to deliver a coherent end product.
Even tiny things like, why did they delay the introduction of USB-C for so long? Start making sense under this framework. If you're not used to this mode of thinking, a lot of the things I'm saying can sound like a stretch but if you adopt the framework, a lot of tiny things they mention suddenly make sense.
People are focusing on the specific output which is a single video but the power comes not from the output but from understanding the process that resulted in that output. Apple knows that other companies will always struggle to reproduce their exact process which is the core source of a durable sustaining advantage.
[1] https://daringfireball.net/linked/2023/10/31/downplaying-sho...
I certainly found it helpful, even as a basic refresher of the field and I learnt a new thing which is apparently there is no single book that explicitly focuses on helping founders move on which feels like a business opportunity?
But also, you can see how I got to a useful place from first principles with the help of an AI. I stopped where I felt I was sufficiently interested that if I were in OPs shoes, I would have just bought the whole book and read it through and I did it in about 15 minutes although I admit I was cheating since I had an end goal in mind already.
I've left it for anyone else to go further in whatever direction and close the gap between where I ended and specific advice like you have provided.
But planners looked at the costs and said we simultaneously can't justify 3 seperate programs and also we can't simplify it down to one program, hence the ungainly mess that resulted.
Like I said before, if someone could have convinced any 2 of the branches of the military to knife the other one, we could have reached a much better place than we are now. That we didn't was a co-ordination problem.
They're not ready for me to tell them that, they need to be guided on the path to the path to the path.
You have no contact in your bio but I've run into this with founders a lot and you need to recognize that what you're going through is a period of grief and mourning. I recommend you look up some books on how grief is processed in breakups or deaths and see if you find points of similarity.
Kubler-Ross' "On Death and Dying" is a classic place to start, it's where the "five stages of grief" model was first introduced. Her version of it is a lot more complex than the pop culture, linear understanding that most people have. She mostly talks about the interplay between the five stages and how we ping pong back and forth in interesting ways.
Also, FWIW, I've found ChatGPT a remarkably efficient tool to "read" books in an area you're totally unfamiliar with and want a quick download. You start by asking it to give you a broad overview of a book/set of books and then dive into the areas you find the most interesting until you arrive at an actionable framework.
How much of the world is spent working on truly greenfield R&D vs how much attention do we pay to it in the media, in our discussions and as examples that we use when we try and convey abstract concepts?
Should array indices start at 0 or 1? My compromise of 0.5 was rejected without, I thought, proper consideration. - Stan Kelly-Bootle
The examples you listed above are what I would call 0.5 solutions. To me, these are straightforward co-ordination problems that failed to find a solution and then devolved into optimization problems that failed to find the right local minima because the problem formulation was flawed in the first place.
Co-ordination problems aren't fuzzy and nice almost all the time. A lot of solving co-ordination problems is getting two people to agree to knife the third to make the problem go away.
People are largely a statistically predictable bag of attributes in many areas that matter for impact. The small amount of areas where humans are wildly unpredictable is what makes us beautiful and we focus on that as the "soul" of a human but they're also not usually the ones that intersect with how we care about impact.
There will be a statistical prediction of all the ways people will choose to get to a train station based on distance, weather, percentage car ownership, quality of sidewalk etc. Something as simple as improving the lighting of the right road to the train station can increase the ridership to a significant degree because it helps people feel safe walking home in the evening which means they also feel safe heading to work in the morning.
You spend enough time with a sensitive enough radar in a large organization and you see the same statistical patterns. People are milling around and impacted by their environment and things you want to make happen aren't happening until you notice the corporate equivalent of the unsafe road and you put down a couple of lights and rapid change occurs. You do it enough times consistently and you get promoted and the patterns become subtler.
a) what a relatively mundane value-add via co-ordination looks like. Something like this is impossible to communicate without so much context but these stories are happening in every single pocket of a giant org.
b) What the artistry of it is. It's not easy and can take years to understand a single co-ordination problem well enough that you push single pebble and cause the right avalanche of change
c) Why anyone who is looking for impact inevitably gets drawn into it, independent of their feelings of whether they personally enjoy it or not (spoiler alert: I have never met anyone who has told me this was their true passion from birth. All of us wade into it reluctantly and eventually develop the internal motivation to make it satisfying).
There’s a reason why nerds who grokked this became masters of the universe for a few solid decades.
Almost all of the hard problems in the world are straightforward coordination problems. The few that aren’t come to mind much easier because they’re much more legible than coordination problems.
To paraphrase a saying, amateurs discuss effort and professionals discuss impact and in whatever field you’re in, with a few tiny notable exceptions, once you reach beyond a certain magnitude of impact it becomes 95% about solving coordination problems.
I'm not saying that any one individual can't find a job that is the unique perfect blend of incentives for them, indeed, the entire point of this framework is that alignment between your goals and the incentives of your job is the most powerful lever an employee can pull. But that incentive structure will necessarily make others working there deeply unhappy as its unique choice of tradeoffs is just shitty in a way invisible to you.
Your job is the venn diagram intersection of an organized system of rewards and punishments from both inside and outside of the firm intersected with your own goals and aspirations over time. Anything not in this intersection is not a job, it's something else we like to delude ourselves into thinking is a job to preserve our egos.
More specifically, your worry about how distorted incentives lead to poor quality software is not your job unless it is your job to worry about said incentives. People keep hoping to go work for one of the magically sane company where all the incentives are correct and everyone is doing the quote-unquote "right" thing at all times. Such a company does not exist because the very concept is incoherent, every system of possible incentives will come with a different set of tradeoffs and the art of operating a firm is to pick from amongst a bunch of shitty options for the least shitty one.
People who do not accept this will be perpetually unhappy and bitter about how others obtain undeserved success because they simply did the unsporting thing of playing the game they were asked to play. You can either be one of those people or you can receive the radical acceptance of what a job is.
I understand if you are getting a human to translate each sentence you can just point them to the right phrases but my understanding is that you're translating text in bulk via machine translation. For scales in which the conversion is linear and the starting point is zero, this task is relatively trivial. For scales like temp where the zero points are different, you need to treat deltas different from absolute values. For scales where one is the inverse of the other, there's a lot of very tricky edge cases that make machine translation hard.
There's 5 links on your HN profile:
* One to your personal website that is just "work in progress" and nothing more
* One to your defunct twitter where you didn't appear to have many followers or did much of note
* One that just returns an opaque blob of json which I'm not sure how I'm meant to interpret
* One that seems like an intriguing project that seems pretty trivial on the surface but I'm willing to be convinced is more substantial but with a plus feature "coming soon" for I don't know how long and a twitter account with 12 followers
* One to a github project that you haven't touched in 9 years, also with a bunch of things you've been meaning to work on for a while but clearly haven't.
I'm willing to be disabused of this notion but my instinct via this gestalt is that you're someone who likes to overpromise and underdeliver. My question would be, what have you been doing in the last 9 months if you haven't had time to polish these bits of your public surface area?
That's probably an unfair judgement from me and in a hotter hiring environment, I'd be willing to bring you in so you could disabuse me of my prejudice and I could be pleasantly surprised but it's much easier now to filter based on trivial gut feel like this and you should be more conscious of the digital image you're putting out into the world because HMs won't bother telling you this stuff because it's an awkward conversation with no gain on their end.
Ideas are instrumental, they're advanced to achieve a specific purpose and their truth and falsity is important to the extent that they affect the instrumentality. You simply cannot separate out an idea from the person advancing the idea because the important question is not one idea in isolation, but of all the universe of ideas, why are we paying attention to this one, right now, towards what ends?
I think you're a lot more optimistic than I am on the number of companies who have gotten QA right.