Platitudes Of Doom

Hector shook his head energetically. “There is no such thing as a short term fix in our business. There is never a way to improve productivity in the short term. When you’re all done, the productivity you will achieve will be the direct result of the long term investment made by those before you. And the only real impact you can have on productivit

... See more

Software problems tend to evolve over time into philosophy problems, a point that's come up in a few Diff pieces, like the Antithesis writeup and Asana's ontology-as-a-service ($). In this particular category, it's the philosophy of work and vocation: a bond trader, accountant, or social media manager doesn't necessarily have to spend much time nav... See more

Nowadays, companies tend to pitch their business models of siloed and quasi innovative problem-solving technology. The whole idea of specialization and offering solutions to particular problems has been haunting us since the time of Adam Smith. Somehow, people seem to forget that no problem arises in isolation. Do we even consider anymore that for ... See more

Engineering organizations today have ballooned to huge numbers of people, but these huge engineering organizations don’t exactly have a reputation for high velocity output. Some of this is the result of what happens with products at scale: it is just fundamentally faster and easier to iterate, improve, or change a product with 100 users than it is ... See more