[HN Gopher] Move fast, but understand the problem first ___________________________________________________________________ Move fast, but understand the problem first Author : d4rkp4ttern Score : 163 points Date : 2021-06-30 17:59 UTC (5 hours ago) (HTM) web link (jacobobryant.com) (TXT) w3m dump (jacobobryant.com) | cbsmith wrote: | I don't understand how people take "move fast" and interpret it | as "move fast with no understanding". The whole point is to "move | fast towards understanding". If understanding isn't the goal | here, that leaves all the activity as little more than stirring | your mixture to accelerate Brownian motion. It seriously | undermines the mystique about intelligence being in any way | involved with the tech industry. | doytch wrote: | Self-selection bias. Clearly those who love the saying are | predisposed to move fast. But they move so fast they haven't | had a chance to understand the saying! | cbsmith wrote: | > Clearly those who love the saying are predisposed to move | fast. | | I don't think that's clear at all. Many "loved" sayings are | "loved" because they help spur one into behaviours one | otherwise would not partake. If you think about it, sayings | about predisposed behaviour can often seem unremarkable. It's | like corporate values: the published corporate values are | ultimately as much aspirational as actual, because the purely | "actual" values are assumed. (For the same reason, if you ask | someone what is most important to them, no one says | "breathing" or "air".) | | > But they move so fast they haven't had a chance to | understand the saying! | | Iterating on NOOP can be done a lot faster, and at much less | expense, than iterating on something; I'd like to think the | eventual steady state of such folks will be to do absolutely | nothing very, very quickly. ;-) | | Hey, human reasoning can take you to some dark places, so I | don't begrudge people where they end up. I'm just confused by | how... broad? the phenomenon is. I'd expect some kind of | Darwinian forces/selection bias that would eventually | relegate such thinking to a quite corner of the universe. | im_down_w_otp wrote: | When your KPIs are "velocity" and your measurements of that KPI | are duly myopic, then all your local incentives are best served | by the fastest random walk to nowhere in-particular. | | I've observed this most pathologically at organizations running | the "hyper growth" playbook. | tehlike wrote: | This is a good read on the topic: | https://commoncog.com/blog/action-produces-information/ | runawaybottle wrote: | The key to this approach is basically pacing. If we think about a | birthday cake and apply 'measure twice, cut once' to the actual | cutting of the cake, this would be a waste of time. However, | 'measure twice, cut once' for getting the ingredients right | before baking is critical. | | This is usually a critique of younger star athletes where they | only have one gear when they first come into a league (usually | that gear is just pedal to the metal). It takes a little bit of | time to understand how to adjust pace so as to be able to move | quickly in some phases, and slowly in others. | lmilcin wrote: | It is ok to cut corners as long as you spend a little bit | understanding what would be the correct solution and what is it | going to cost/benefit you. | | I have a notebook with all corners we cut at my current project. | Also a bunch of other stuff (like various types of problems). The | new designs are getting evaluated against my notebook. | | I know it sounds funny but I just can't get into agreement with | other people on how to make notes of technical debt and so, not | wanting to spend too much effort on it, I just made it a notebook | which I am diligently filling whenever I hear something that I | would like fixed. | andreacavagna wrote: | I just lived this on my skin. | | My team and I, 4 engineers, we focused for about 2 years only on | moving fast, and moving on doing a feature battle with the | competitors. | | After all this this we stopped and restarted a new journey | focusing on things that really matter: - Why - How - What Are we | doing it, and it changed everything for us. | | My teammate has posted the story of the last 7 years of my team | today, i give you the link if you are interested in knowing more: | | https://medium.com/leapp-cloud/road-to-noovolari-89df7704e31... | lapp0 wrote: | Absolutely riveting and insightful article, this one. | | Who'da thought it that to get stuff done quickly but correctly, | ya gotta move fast, actually do things, but also think about what | you're doing. Mind = b l o w n! | didibus wrote: | > to get stuff done quickly but correctly, ya gotta move fast, | actually do things, but also think about what you're doing | | As much as this seems self-evident, I think it's worth saying | it explicitly, because I do think a lot of people skip the | thinking and sometimes even the doing, and end up just moving | helplessly in urgent nonsense that takes you nowhere, doing | nothing more than panicking. | SN76477 wrote: | It is how we are wired. To be honest, deep thinking is hard, | like really hard. | | Only though experience do we know what is and is not worth | our time (and thinking) | 29athrowaway wrote: | There is no "one size fits all" problem solving approach that is | optimal for every problem. | | Sometimes "measure twice cut once" makes sense, sometimes it | doesn't. | | My standard is that by the time you finish, you should understand | the problem as well as how your solution works. | legitster wrote: | I get the sentiment, but 9/10 you won't actually understand the | problem until you actually work on it. Work leads to | understanding but understanding usually doesn't lead to work. | | The counter to this are stories like Stripe. Collison has | famously said they never would have started the company if they | actually knew how hard the problem was when the started. They | identified the problem and committed to solving it. But jumping | in blind increased their chance of actually making something | unique instead of just another credit card gateway. | areichert wrote: | re: Stripe, it feels like what was more important was that they | understood that what they were working on truly _was_ a problem | -- I don't think the point of the article is to say that you | need to completely understand every nuance of the problem | you're solving before you can move fast, but that there's a | base level of understanding you need to have in order to be | effective (which is probably less common in founders/startups | than most people think) -\\_(tsu)_/- | gmfawcett wrote: | Not sure it counters the story, it just sounds like selection | bias -- for every Collison that won big, there must be a | hundred shadow Collisons who jumped in blind but failed. I | totally agree with your first point, though. | cbsmith wrote: | A hundred would be understating it. Thousands easily. | cbsmith wrote: | > I get the sentiment, but 9/10 you won't actually understand | the problem until you actually work on it. | | Yes, but the "work on it" should be designed so that you | progress in that understanding. Too often it does not. | throwawayboise wrote: | Usually the people asking for the solution don't even really | understand the problem. How often are your probing questions at | a requirements-gathering meeting met with "we'll have to get | back to you on that" | thom wrote: | I think it's very easy to make folksy intuitive sounding rules | from almost any angle here, and none of them are really | definitive because the world is infinitely complex. Move fast, | but not too fast. Think, but not for too long. Do, but not too | early or too late. I don't think there is a one size fits all | answer for any person or organisation. | | I think the correct fundamental framework, which is compatible | with all sides of the argument, is that you must be mindful of | your learning rate. Some approaches are depth first - perhaps | that depth is satisfactory to learn what you need to solve real | problems. But perhaps what you actually need is breadth. There is | no way to say which is right - you literally have to just stress | it out, it's not fun. Some problems only yield information when | you have skin in the game - there's no way to reason out the | right approach, you need to push at real boundaries and see what | happens. Some of the boundaries, all of the boundaries, keep | pushing, take a pause... again, you can't know for sure what's | right. All you can do is constantly ask yourself - am I learning? | Am I generating hypotheses, testing them, proving at least some? | The framework is different for everyone, and it's _work_. | tomrod wrote: | "In the words of the ancients, one should make his decisions | within the space of seven breaths. Lord Takandobu said, "If | discrimination is long, it will spoil." Lord Naoshige said, | "When matters are done leisurely, seven out of ten will turn | out badly. A warrior is a person who does things quickly. | | When your mind is going hither and thither, discrimination will | never be brought to a conclusion. With an intense, fresh and | undelaying spirit, one will make his judgments within the space | of seven breaths. It is a matter of being determined and having | the spirit to break right through to the other side." | | - From the Hagakure | catwind7 wrote: | it seems to come from the same place of wanting a simple rule | to pattern match against some problem space so we don't have to | think too hard about it every time. | | also ... the author cites sam altman as evidence that his | thinking is on the right track, but can you really argue | against a statement like "Almost everyone I've ever met would | be well-served by spending more time thinking about what to | focus on"? that's about as close to a one size fits all | statement as "almost everyone who succeeds thinks" | | i sometimes wonder if this comes from a place of fear. Maybe | we're scared of really listening to customers / users / | colleagues / stakeholders and so we invent these rules to hold | ourselves accountable for what's probably pretty obvious from | the outside | kthejoker2 wrote: | I'm a consultant, been on thousands of calls with customers, | partners, colleagues ... after all this time it is still | truly astounding how many people wait to talk instead of | listen, and cannot or will not exhibit professional empathy | and curiosity. | | It truly is just not in our nature. | didibus wrote: | To me, the secret is being okay with failure, learning from it, | than trying again. | | I've heard this called the Feynman technique before. Pretend as | if you know what you are doing and what to do, than start doing | it as if you knew how, and each time you fail or realize you | don't know how to proceed, stop, go learn only as much as you | need too unblock your next step, rinse and repeat. | | It's a really good way to eventually learn and succeed, while | wasting as little time as possible. | | The issue is that, when it comes to software development, where | you need to build upon what you've done before to keep moving | forward, the risk is that all your prior steps weren't | considering your next ones, and at the time you built them you | didn't really look further, you were focused on figuring out | only the next move pretending you knew it all. | | So in a startup setting, it kind of means that if you follow | this technique, you'll quickly learn and figure out what and | how to do things, but you'll also fail a lot, and those | failures will pile up, and all you built during that process | might not end up being usable in the end, as it could be a | monster of tech dept, limitations and bad decisions. | | That's where a lot of startup have a "big rewrite" phase | normally. | | This still works if you are okay with having that big | rewrite/refactor phase, and as long as your monster was still | good enough to carve you a big customer base or investor | interest, that'll be patient enough to wait for your rewrite. | | I'm not sure how to summarize this, but there are some problems | that each step you take you've now advanced closer to the | solution, so it's fine to not think holistically about it all, | but focus one thing at a time. While there are other problems | where that only take you so far, and at some point you have to | think holistically, do I need to do anything about this | foundation in planning of what I'll later build upon it? That | kind of thing. | | But I think often what happens is people are too afraid to | fail, and they start thinking holistically, except they | actually are not expert enough to be doing so. So they start | thinking all hypothetical, imagining the problems that will | come, and that all ends up a waste of time. | | If they'd tried, tried and tried some more, then they'd | actually have learned a lot, and now would possibly be on a | place to actually think holistically. | | I heard a pretty good saying on that: | | "The difference between the master and the beginner, is that | the master has failed more time than the beginner has tried". | | I think it's by Stephen McCranie | MaxBarraclough wrote: | > To me, the secret is being okay with failure, learning from | it, than trying again. | | But that's just what thom's talking about. Sometimes you need | to know when to quit. | | I'm not normally one to link to Dilbert, but: | https://dilbert.com/strip/2012-11-20 | dalbasal wrote: | The wisdom of folksy statements is usually a distillation of a | morality tale of some sort. Reasoning about them in the | abstract is missing the point. It isn't a pure logic kind of | exercise. | | Anyway, discussing the wisdom rally cries, 15 years later... | Most business wisdom is temporal. What applies to a >10 person | startup hoping to raise $4m by the end of 2006 may not be the | applicable wisdom today. | karaterobot wrote: | I don't think this is advising you to spend _all_ your time | understanding the problem. Clearly, you can 't ever have | perfect information, and you can waste your time in analysis | paralysis. | | I read this post as saying that, given how product development | is path-dependent, most people should do a lot more up-front | discovery work than they are today. | | What I mean is, it's empirically very rare for people to just | throw away a bad idea: they're more likely to modify it, pile | more features on to it, or just delude themselves into thinking | it will work eventually. But, usually it doesn't. | | We can say "be willing to throw it all away and start over when | you learn new information", but in practice people don't do | this. So, it might be more effective for most people to do, | say, 50% more up-front work than they're already doing to de- | risk their ideas before committing anything to them. It's | clearly not a guarantee of success, just a way to improve your | chances and save your own time. | bsder wrote: | I would distill startup advice down to: "Survive. Period." | | You win the startup game by being in the right place at the | right time. The longer your survive, the higher your odds of | being "at the right time". | | Most "overnight successes" were 10+ years in the making. | skeeter2020 wrote: | How about make lots of mistakes, but (a) don't repeat them and | (b) nothing fatal? | thom wrote: | You could probably poke holes even then, because something | that's a mistake _now_ might not be a mistake later. | capnorange wrote: | most problems in startup like environments(particularly from my | experience in social networks), "understanding the problem" is | not as easy. That's why trial and error, moving fast works. | _wldu wrote: | Great advice. Anytime you do things quickly, it's best to | carefully understand the details of what you are doing, otherwise | mistakes are made and/or accidents occur. | civilized wrote: | Do everything that is good to do, but first do every other thing | that you need to do before. | swframe2 wrote: | (maybe off topic; these questions are highly subjective) I wanted | to get your opinion on this situation. In the group I work in, | almost all the high impact projects are assigned to foreign | educated coworkers partly due to their faster execution pace. Do | you think foreign educated engineers in your group/company | execute at a faster pace than engineers educated in the US? I've | wondered if the highly competitive educational paths foreign | educated coworkers have had to take is a "filter" so those who | eventually "make it" to the US are a very unique subset. | Basically, do you think there are issues (for non-foreign | educated engineers) with project assignment and performance | ranking because of this at your company? | areichert wrote: | As a programmer-turned-founder, this is something I have to | remind myself all the time... it's often very hard to resist the | urge to just keep coding and launching and throwing things at the | wall until something sticks, because that's what I'm "good at" | and it creates an illusion of productivity and "moving fast". | | It seems like some people are commenting that the advice in the | article is common sense, but I think when your mindset is to move | fast, it can be easy to delude yourself into thinking you | understand a problem when you're really just married to an idea | but too scared to go out and discover whether it's actually | solving something real or not. ___________________________________________________________________ (page generated 2021-06-30 23:00 UTC)