A business observation and a technical rant

[mangosteen]

Observation:
In business and in life, it's useful to have a meta process going in your head about the level of the conversation. Are you discussing things at the same layer of abstraction as everyone around you, and if you're not, is there a reason?

This is how you get the geek vox clamantis complex: "This won't work. The salesperson is

Comments

[dpolicar]

(nods)

Many years ago, I was involved in a training exercise in which we were given case studies of bridge-building.

So I got the famous Tacoma-Narrows and gave a little presentation about it, and was feeling proud of myself when asked about take-aways for making the general observation that it's not enough to analyze the system on day one; you have to understand how the system is going to interact with its environment over time.

And the trainer asked me what the project had gotten right, and I laughed and said "Well, nothing! I mean, it's hard for a bridge to go more wrong than literally shaking itself to pieces and falling into the water."

And he shook his head and said "No, actually, they got almost everything right. There actually were people who wanted to get from one edge of the river to another, and were willing to use a bridge to do so, and they had the resources to actually finish building it. All they got wrong was the bridge implementation itself, and when they rebuilt the bridge with a better architecture it was successful. They could have done much worse."

And indeed, several of the projects other students went on to discuss failed entirely and unrecoverably because they'd gotten that stuff wrong, even though the architecture was sound.

Which is to say, yeah, projects can fail at many different levels of abstraction.