[HN Gopher] If you succeed; you will fail
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       If you succeed; you will fail
        
       Author : imadj
       Score  : 34 points
       Date   : 2023-08-13 19:30 UTC (3 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (boyter.org)
 (TXT) w3m dump (boyter.org)
        
       | ChazDazzle wrote:
       | > I learnt a few things from this. The first is, some companies
       | or organisations within them need failure in order to progress.
       | 
       | Encountered a similar situation a few years back while working
       | for a government client. My advice to the team was that we needed
       | to "let the train wreck happen."
        
       | vsareto wrote:
       | >I also learnt to only become as involved and care as much as the
       | customer. If they aren't willing to go that extra mile then why
       | should I?
       | 
       | There was probably a good portion of that army of ops and
       | developers that felt the same way. And even if you can move
       | mountains to point fingers and clean out all of the bad people,
       | train the average ones, and keep the good ones around, you will
       | likely get little compensation out of it, so no one does that.
       | Even then, it's hard to blame incompetent people getting jobs and
       | holding on to them. There's a lack of standards for skill and
       | training so naturally people slip through the variety of bespoke
       | vetting processes that companies come up with. There's also some
       | economic reasons why people hold on to jobs for far longer than
       | they should, even if they know they're bad at it.
       | 
       | Large amounts of bad complexity slowly erodes morale, but bad
       | decisions like this one can set it on fire. Accruing bad
       | complexity may not have any solid failures to trigger
       | reassessment, which is why it often becomes a problem and stays a
       | problem. It's an obvious problem for new people with fresh
       | perspectives, while incumbents might have gotten used to it.
        
       | thirdplace_ wrote:
       | reminds me of the similar sentiment that a failure may be
       | required in order to get all parties to accept that a
       | change/improvement is needed.
        
         | esafak wrote:
         | "We don't know how to quantify rare or latent events."
        
         | hinkley wrote:
         | I used to resent coworkers saying "sometimes you have to let
         | the baby fall down" and now I say it.
        
       | anotherhue wrote:
       | I've seen versions of this, anytime someone builds on lambda and
       | then points it at something not built on lambda.
       | 
       | The impedance mismatch is usually too great and speaks to some
       | serious deficiency at the architecture stage.
        
         | doctor_eval wrote:
         | They said the system could be brought down by a RPI over DSL.
         | 
         | My guess is that the Auth system, which became the bottleneck,
         | authenticated everywhere at once, which would be super slow.
         | 
         | Not sure what lambda had to do with this. The whole SAP thing
         | reads like a legacy nightmare.
        
       | ilaksh wrote:
       | Poor management from executives seems to be the norm.
       | 
       | - They failed to get the internal developer to buy in to the
       | project or really work with the other team.
       | 
       | - They insisted on launching even though it was explained that
       | the system wasn't ready.
       | 
       | - Insisted on having a launch party when failure was expected.
        
       | 2600guy wrote:
       | Cause one person with the support of c level makes a decision, we
       | can all stand back and watch 70+ years of success crash and burn
       | in flames.
        
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       (page generated 2023-08-13 23:00 UTC)