5 ms·

I have a rule of thumb that goes something like, if you want to get people to use something 2x as much you need to make it 4x more reliable. The reliability bec

by hinkley 15d ago

I have a rule of thumb that goes something like, if you want to get people to use something 2x as much you need to make it 4x more reliable. The reliability becomes a enticement, and you will often underestimate how much more popular it will get, so if you aim for 2x you will likely see 3x and still have a lower incident rate per week than you experienced with lower traffic. None of your users or managers think about errors as fraction of interactions. Even despite trying to label things as 99.99% reliable. Some managers will claim they do, but they aren’t being honest with themselves. Usually when they get mad it will be about having to deal with a problem happening twice in a week or a month. So now they’re yelling at you while you want to yell at them about being dishonest.

paimapi 15d ago
right, that was always the most surprising thing I saw when I made the career leap into tech for all of it's vaunted 'big data' and 'metrics-driven outcomes' and whatnot, as soon as a single medium-to-large user starts complaining about an obscure component or wanting new features it was all hands on deck, roadmaps be damned, data out the window, who cares about CVEs/tech debt/fixing MVPs, let's do it MVP (again) instead of building something maintainable and extensible and then forget all about it like a child with ADHD when the next largeish user sends your C-suite an angry DM meanwhile the core features that most people are happy with and the entire reason they chose your solution gets ignored and one day you look in your lunchbox and the food is all gone and C-suite's golden parachuted out to some cushier job somewhere else
- hinkley 14d ago
  Yeah the number of times displeasure with our lack of progress turned out to be some customer yelling at a manager who forgot to prioritize work for that customer and I later discovered was just letting the shit roll downhill was too damned high. I'm getting shit because you're incapable of uttering the phrase, "I messed up." Fuck that and fuck you. As someone once put it, we should learn from the noble mule, who when beaten is more likely to stubbornly sit down and refuse to move than to get on with the work at hand.

by hinkley 15d ago

paimapi 15d ago

right, that was always the most surprising thing I saw when I made the career leap into tech for all of it's vaunted 'big data' and 'metrics-driven outcomes' and whatnot, as soon as a single medium-to-large user starts complaining about an obscure component or wanting new features it was all hands on deck, roadmaps be damned, data out the window, who cares about CVEs/tech debt/fixing MVPs, let's do it MVP (again) instead of building something maintainable and extensible and then forget all about it like a child with ADHD when the next largeish user sends your C-suite an angry DM meanwhile the core features that most people are happy with and the entire reason they chose your solution gets ignored and one day you look in your lunchbox and the food is all gone and C-suite's golden parachuted out to some cushier job somewhere else

hinkley 14d ago
Yeah the number of times displeasure with our lack of progress turned out to be some customer yelling at a manager who forgot to prioritize work for that customer and I later discovered was just letting the shit roll downhill was too damned high. I'm getting shit because you're incapable of uttering the phrase, "I messed up." Fuck that and fuck you. As someone once put it, we should learn from the noble mule, who when beaten is more likely to stubbornly sit down and refuse to move than to get on with the work at hand.