[HN Gopher] Move Fast and Abandon Things
___________________________________________________________________
Move Fast and Abandon Things
Author : JKCalhoun
Score : 312 points
Date : 2024-09-24 11:58 UTC (11 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (engineersneedart.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (engineersneedart.com)
| mojuba wrote:
| If the goal of this article is to normalize abandoning your
| projects then I'm not so sure it's a good idea. All else aside it
| can be a horrendous waste of time and no amount of "at least I've
| learned something" can justify that. Learn by also finishing
| stuff, right?
| Fellshard wrote:
| That is a misreading of the article. It's more about discovery
| through quick, iterative prototyping, which _can_ include rapid
| discovery of fatal flaws early.
| Dalewyn wrote:
| As Musk would say: Waste metal, not time.
| kyledrake wrote:
| The man that spent his time on an overpriced takeover and
| subsequent ruining of Twitter instead of spending that time
| with the children he abandoned is a cautionary tale of
| wasted time, not a sage to be mined for wisdom.
| Dalewyn wrote:
| Wasting metal instead of time is the difference between
| Dragon and Starliner.
|
| I will listen to the guy who's actually getting things
| done, thanks.
| kyledrake wrote:
| Imagine how much more he would get done if he addressed
| his mental illness and filled his life with the richness
| of family and social bonds instead of wasting that time
| gaming an algorithm on a platform he paid too much for to
| become the leading proprietor of authoritarian-
| conservative junk posting.
|
| If anyone thinks he doesn't have enough time for that, go
| over to Twitter and look at what he's doing with that
| time he doesn't have right now.
| Dalewyn wrote:
| My only takeaway from this exchange is you're jealous the
| man had the money to just go and buy Mysterious Twitter X
| and do with it as he wants, instead of complaining about
| it like the rest of us.
| kyledrake wrote:
| Is he actually calling it Mysterious Twitter X now?
| Eisenstein wrote:
| I would like you to image a day in his life.
|
| His pleasures, accomplishments, fears, and compulsions.
|
| A personality and a lifestyle that drives away everyone
| except acquaintances and employees.
|
| The kind of insecurity that causes a person to gravely
| insult a someone who risked their life, many times over,
| to save the lives of strangers half a world from their
| home because they dismissed your media ploy in public.
|
| The kind of personality that is so addicted to attention
| that despite repeated public embarrassments that would
| make most people rethink their actions, they reform their
| own worldview in order to blame society instead of
| rightfully feeling ashamed.
|
| A person who has a compulsion to make money constantly
| when there is no longer any purpose to do so -- to the
| point where they use guest appearances on comedy shows to
| pump and dump novelty crypto coins in order to make a few
| more pennies.
|
| Does that sound like a happy, content person? If anyone
| is jealous of that life just so that they can have the
| fame then all I can say is that there is ever an
| opportunity where one of us can grab that for themselves,
| please -- be my guest.
| kyledrake wrote:
| > The kind of insecurity that causes a person to gravely
| insult a someone who risked their life, many times over,
| to save the lives of strangers half a world from their
| home because they dismissed your media ploy in public.
|
| Called him a pedophile no less. He didn't win the libel
| case in court, but he certainly deserved to.
|
| The actual story of the cave rescue and the highly
| specialized cave divers that pulled it off is quite
| incredible, I highly recommend seeing it as it happens in
| The Rescue. The documentary takes the high ground and
| doesn't mention the Musk fiasco, but without directly
| doing so, also lays waste to how impossible the submarine
| idea was: https://films.nationalgeographic.com/the-rescue
| lelanthran wrote:
| > Imagine how much more he would get done if he addressed
| his mental illness and filled his life with the richness
| of family and social bonds
|
| The people I know who satisfy that definition don't
| generally get shit done. The ones who do are outliers;
| i.e. so rare that you may as well judge them to be a
| rounding error.
| MetaWhirledPeas wrote:
| > Imagine how much more he would get done if he addressed
| his mental illness and filled his life with the richness
| of family and social bonds
|
| His life might be richer, but I don't think he would get
| more done. I do think he is a cautionary tale, but there
| are also many insights to be gained.
|
| You shouldn't optimize your life for output, but for
| those moments when you _do_ want to optimize your output
| it makes sense to glean from those who are very good at
| it.
| kyledrake wrote:
| Is being an avoidant parent a precondition to being a
| successful executive? My direct anecdotal experience with
| successful executives is quite the opposite.
|
| I really think we're giving him far too much credit to
| assume this is all an intentional time-saving life hack
| to improve his ability to optimize his output for some
| planet-saving goal (which his most recent work, frankly,
| has not been).
| bunderbunder wrote:
| It's worth pointing out here that SpaceX's current
| product development practices and Boeing's current
| product development practices is a bit of a false
| dichotomy. We could also, for example, consider how
| Boeing did things a few decades ago.
|
| One particular reason I don't like this false dichotomy
| is that SpaceX's approach has negative externalities that
| aren't getting enough attention because everybody's so
| starstruck by all the fancy rockets. There's a reason the
| FAA and EPA are starting to pressure SpaceX about the
| environmental and social impact of their way of doing
| business. Maybe next OSHA can get on them for the high
| workplace injury rate. You're not _actually_ doing things
| more cheaply if what you 're really doing is hiding costs
| that would belong on your balance sheet by
| surreptitiously foisting them onto the public with the
| help of corrupt politicians.
|
| (Ostensible libertarians, pay extra attention to those
| last six words.)
| jsight wrote:
| It is funny how much criticism you are taking for saying
| things that are obviously true.
|
| Yes, Musk's personal life is a mess and noone would enjoy
| being him.
|
| That can be true at the same time as his business
| philosophy effectively pushes forward multiple businesses
| more quickly than their competitors. That can even be
| true while his businesses are run in ways that most of us
| would find unacceptable.
|
| Regardless of palatability, SpaceX is effective.
| thuruv wrote:
| +1 I am reading this is exactly pointing to the same concept
| as the todo management, but not addressing the todo
| paralysis. Everyone's mileage may vary. I accept that. Yet
| misreading something is far more dangerous than ignorance.
| ebiester wrote:
| The thing is that he _also_ finished stuff.
|
| The goal is to avoid analysis paralysis and "just try it"
| instead of keep thinking about it.
|
| It's a bias toward action and rejecting sunk cost.
| bunderbunder wrote:
| There's a great Smarter Every Day episode where Destin works
| with a glassblowing shop to create shattered Prince Rupert's
| drops encased in blocks of resin.
|
| Nobody has done this before, they're working out how to do it
| as they go along, they make quite a few mistakes along the way.
| One of the things the video highlights is how, when this
| happens, the team wouldn't just stop and try the same thing
| again. They'd keep going, break it _all the way_ , basically
| just use it as an opportunity to fuck around with their
| materials.
|
| He waxes poetic about how great this is. They're taking
| advantage of an unparalleled opportunity to learn more about
| the behavior of the materials they're working with. Because
| they're now free to try things they wouldn't want to do if they
| were still on the path to creating a complete, polished
| product. It doesn't even really count as taking risks anymore,
| because you can't really mess up something that's already
| trash.
|
| And he points out, rightly, that a mindset like that that
| values learning and experimentation over always succeeding, is
| one of the best ways to become truly great at what you do.
| criddell wrote:
| Like John Lennon once said, time you enjoy wasting isn't
| wasted.
| mojuba wrote:
| Artists can say that, especially if it's John Lennon :) but
| I'm not sure I can apply it to myself
| yladiz wrote:
| Why?
| criddell wrote:
| Well, the blog is called _Engineers Need Art_.
|
| I think your reluctance comes from a different
| prioritization. The writer is clearly interested in
| developing their creativity (and are wildly succeeding!).
| The project is the means to do that. Continuing on a
| project even after it no longer is the best use of your
| time is just a type of sunk cost fallacy.
| Mathnerd314 wrote:
| I think it's a bad title. The moral is more like "work on
| everything you can think of but don't release anything until
| it's ready. And some projects will never be ready, but that's
| OK - you can look at them 30 years later and release them on
| github for nostalgia." ChatGPT summarizes it as "Build Fast,
| Ship Never (Until You Do)"
| optymizer wrote:
| I think it's healthy for projects to die. It frees up your time
| to start another project, instead of being stuck in a rut.
|
| I sometimes find myself working on a project that goes nowhere,
| thinking that if I just put enough effort it will go somewhere,
| and I'm not having any fun or learning new things. And I'm hard
| on myself with thoughts like "I need to finish it, I need to
| finish it" but then when I ask myself: 'why?', it's usually
| because of this fear of _not finishing the project_ or maybe
| it's the fear of not being able to distinguish the grinding
| phase from the failed project phase.
|
| Either way, too many times I have experienced a liberating
| feeling when I failed. It's a chance to start over.
| m463 wrote:
| Maybe take things as far as they should go, but no further.
|
| also: sunk cost fallacy
| xiaoxiong wrote:
| Some of the pixel art in those screenshots is seriously awesome!
| karaterobot wrote:
| That's a neat blog all around. Lots of interesting stuff to poke
| around in.
|
| I think it's okay to abandon things, and you can certainly learn
| things and reuse parts from abandoned projects. For me, a
| breakthrough moment was when I decided to make things so small
| that I could finish them. It helped me develop the skill of
| finishing things, which is a separate skill that's hard to learn,
| because it only happens at the end of a process so long and hard
| you almost never make it there. All my friends who are making
| video games start by writing their own engine, and get burnt out
| somewhere around the point where they're making a level editor.
| They learn a lot about things like tooling (which,
| coincidentally, is a lot like what they already knew how to do),
| but never actually make the game. It'd be like learning stone
| masonry by building a cathedral--you won't live to see the end.
| Start so small that you can't fail, then work your way up to
| bigger and bigger projects.
| eddd-ddde wrote:
| I don't think I've ever finished a _single_ personal project.
| At least for me that's _the_ hardest skill to develop.
| EricE wrote:
| Luckily this is also on the front page today:
| https://github.com/readme/guides/finish-your-projects
| cezart wrote:
| Thank you for sharing this! I think a focus on shrinking
| personal projects to the point I might actually finish them,
| might be just what I need right now
| bob1029 wrote:
| > All my friends who are making video games start by writing
| their own engine
|
| I've been there and done that one a few times. Even if you
| decide to use existing tools, you can easily get caught up in
| these infinitely-deep pools of complexity.
|
| I am working on a Unity project right now wherein I found
| myself antagonizing over how to best develop an RTS-style
| building placement system. Instead of doing what I would
| typically do (dive right in), I decided that I would rework the
| game concept to eliminate the need for the player to place
| buildings at all. After some experimentation, it turned out
| that this was actually a superior user experience for what I
| was trying to achieve. I initially rationalized it as "I'll add
| the building system in the next iteration". It likely won't
| happen now.
|
| Less is almost always more. That small starting point _actually
| being finished_ is like nitromethane for the next iteration.
| Getting to 100% is what makes that next pass so much better.
| Getting to 80% will leave you feeling like you need to push the
| rock back up the hill all over again.
| lelanthran wrote:
| > I decided that I would rework the game concept to eliminate
| the need for the player to place buildings at all.
|
| This sounds interesting. Can you explain a bit more about
| this?
| bob1029 wrote:
| Sure. I replaced the building system with a big portal that
| each team controls. Instead of in-game buildings, I built a
| menu/UI system that allows the player to control which
| units would come out of the portal. Units don't take
| commands from the player (another massive simplification).
| They only seek out the enemy portal and will engage other
| units on that path automatically. Destruction of the portal
| is the win condition.
|
| Unity's navmesh system is doing most of the heavy lifting
| right now. It's amazing how much functionality you can get
| out of it before you have to reach for physics and
| animation.
| iamacyborg wrote:
| Sounds vaguely similar to a late 90's pc/playstation game
| I recall playing, although that also had capture points
| and the ability to build defense structures along the
| predetermined paths.
|
| Edit - this one
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Future_Cop:_LAPD
| kaz-inc wrote:
| This reminds me of something mixing the Age of War flash
| game (which had great music) and TeamFight Tactics (TFT).
| An RTS without some kind of unit control seems strange,
| but interesting as it is often the greatest barrier to
| accessing the game.
| burningChrome wrote:
| >> I think it's okay to abandon things, and you can certainly
| learn things and reuse parts from abandoned projects.
|
| I recently moved from front-end development into accessibility.
| Years ago, I had built a bunch of static sites, templates and
| other design projects that I had eventually abandoned for
| various reasons.
|
| Now that I'm in accessibility, I've gone back and dug many of
| these out and have re-built them to be accessible. Several used
| very old versions of bootstrap, so part of what I did was also
| upgrading to the latest version of bootstrap as well.
|
| I learned so much just from going back and making those older
| designs accessible. Its something that I definitely feel gave
| me a better perspective on stuff we look for when we're
| assessing sites and applications. It was also a real wake up as
| to how much of the stuff I built wasn't accessible at all.
| chambers wrote:
| > It helped me develop the skill of finishing things, which is
| a separate skill that's hard to learn, because it only happens
| at the end of a process so long and hard you almost never make
| it there.
|
| Great insight. The skill of finishing what you started, is
| something that feels elided in discussions around productivity.
| Is there a blogpost or article that explains it even more?
| rurban wrote:
| That's exactly the playbook how they destroyed Perl6 then. They
| had the very same outspoken motto "Move fast and destroy things".
| They indeed do so very successfully, instead of fixing just the
| few outstanding bugs.
| wduquette wrote:
| That's not what the OP said. He said, "Try things quickly, and
| abandon the ones that don't pan out." Nothing in there about
| destroying things that are working.
| rurban wrote:
| I didn't say that. I said that you should not destroy things
| that dont work. You should rather fix it.
| wduquette wrote:
| Why? It's an idea you try to see if it has value. If it
| turns out not to have value, move on to something else.
| adamc wrote:
| I like this and find it interesting, but at an organizational
| level, it strikes me as trickier to do. A lot of the things we
| discover about projects and technologies have to do with its
| feasibility at whatever scale our real projects operate on, and
| don't necessarily pop-up in smaller experiments. (And sometimes
| they aren't really technical issues at all, but issues of "can we
| get most developers here to understand doing it _this_ way.)
|
| None of which means we shouldn't do more of this. You can learn
| things by trying smaller projects. It's just not a guarantee it
| will work in the large.
| avg_dev wrote:
| this seems like a fantastic way to look back on a career where
| the author started as a prolific solo developer and later became
| an effective, fast, and contributing part of an effective
| development team. it was also just really fun to read, about the
| code reuse, the scrapping of ideas, the rewrites, etc.
| specialist wrote:
| Yes and:
|
| Quote from another blog entry
|
| _" In the end I think Apple got an engineer for the next
| twenty-five years that, though not the cleverest engineer, was
| one that worked quickly to prototype new ideas and took on some
| of the gruntwork that not every engineer wanted to work on."_
|
| Some of us like doing the blue-collar parts. Plumbing,
| prototyping, fixing bugs, fit & finish, tackling tech debt.
|
| Alas, today's leetcode themed hazing rituals, err, interviewing
| filters out people like me, and presumably John Calhoun.
|
| I was fortunate to manage project and product teams with a mix
| of skills, temperments, experience. Pairing up doers with
| esthetes can work out great. In that "whole greater than the
| sum" sort of way.
|
| FWIW, most of the doers (I've managed or worked with) had no CS
| education and experience. Just an interest, curiousity in tech.
| Notables were a ballet dancer, historian, handful of mechanics,
| biologist, aeronautic engineer, sculpture, and of course
| musicians. People who would never get hired, much less
| considered, today.
|
| Every team needs at least one doer.
| brendanfinan wrote:
| Engineer Sneed Art
| gwervc wrote:
| Glad I'm not the only one who parsed the domain as such :)
| taeric wrote:
| Somewhat related, I think, I am always surprised at how often we
| don't have non-critical paths in jobs. Half the reason stress is
| so high, it seems, is we have backed ourselves into a situation
| where things have to succeed.
| mym1990 wrote:
| The irony of the #3 thing on HN today being this, and the #5
| thing being 'Finish Your Projects' haha. Good points all around.
| loup-vaillant wrote:
| In a sense though, seeing that whatever project we're working
| on is no longer worth pursuing, _is_ finishing that project.
|
| That's very different from letting life happen and stop working
| on it without really having decided it.
| mathgeek wrote:
| I usually think of abandoning and finishing as two different
| ways to resolve a project. Resolution is a good goal that
| allows you to be explicit about what was finished or not
| before stopping.
| mym1990 wrote:
| Closure is important! I do feel that I get in the mindset of
| saying "I'm gonna get back to this later" and it just never
| happens, meanwhile taking precious mental capacity every time
| I think about doing that thing. It's okay to say "I tried it,
| I don't need to prove anything, on to the next adventure".
| parsimo2010 wrote:
| I think that these ideas are both compatible. In this blog
| post, it looks like the author finished working prototypes of
| several games but elected not to push them to a full release.
| So I think they "finished" the work, and we can't fault them
| for estimating that it wouldn't be worthwhile to make a full
| release.
|
| Not finishing a project in this case would be abandoning a game
| idea that you liked before you even got to a working prototype
| stage. Because then you can't even see if your new idea plays
| well.
| mym1990 wrote:
| Yeah totally, I don't disagree with that assessment. I would
| say it's not productive to try to complete every single thing
| we start. It was just the headline snippets that were funny
| to me.
| Stem0037 wrote:
| It's interesting to consider how your guerrilla programming
| techniques could integrate with contemporary development tools
| and practices.
|
| For instance, leveraging version control systems more extensively
| or utilizing collaborative platforms might enhance the efficiency
| and scalability of your projects.
| for_i_in_range wrote:
| Some of the worst advice I read comes from some of the smartest
| people out there.
| zackmorris wrote:
| This post really resonated with me, as I have between a dozen and
| a hundred abandoned projects, mostly games, since I started
| programming around 1989. Most of them written for the Mac Plus or
| Mac LC. And many of them following a similar mechanic or art
| style to the ones in the post.
|
| I think of the few shipped projects I've released or been part of
| as a shadow of who I am. Same with my resume and work experience.
| They're a fingerprint of a whole being living a dream life that
| never manifested, because I never had an early win to build upon.
| That's why I think UBI might magnify human potential by 10 or 100
| fold, to get us from the service economy to agency and self-
| actualization, producing our own residual incomes.
|
| Oh and I played Pararena a ton!
| imchillyb wrote:
| If minimum wage didn't work, what metric makes you believe that
| a similar system but paying those who don't work, will?
|
| This type of thinking truly baffles me. This magic UBI will be
| minimum wage for the masses that don't work.
|
| How could that, possibly, be sustainable or even good?
| alexissantos wrote:
| Part of me wonders if this parallels the venture capital
| approach. Many won't don't anything economically productive
| with the opportunity UBI affords them, but the ones that do
| may make the cost worthwhile.
|
| Not sure if that's how it would actually pan out, of course,
| but I think it's plausible.
| malignblade wrote:
| Answering your literal question, how could it "possibly" be
| good:
|
| Minimum wage probably doesn't work because it means a lot of
| people live in precarity while both emotionally and
| physically exhausting them. It might just be that minimum
| wage has stagnated while COL has skyrocketed. If the point of
| minimum wage is that it provides people with a guaranteed
| dignified life as long as they are employed, that needs to
| keep up with the cost of living a normal life in order to
| keep its effectiveness. That is one reason it might be
| "failing" although I don't know exactly what you mean by
| that.
|
| > get us from the service economy to agency and self-
| actualization
|
| This is the thing I think most people have a hard time
| connecting to "measurable utility" but will probably be the
| most sweeping effect of UBI or similar. Think about your
| typical gig worker, minimum wage worker in some high-turnover
| environment etc. This person probably does not have the
| financial safety net to pursue something meaningful, or to
| take the risk reskilling, or to otherwise improve their
| emotional and financial well-being.
|
| You will probably always have free-riders or people who just
| want to consume without producing. But is it better to have a
| society of exhausted, frustrated, barely-hanging-on people,
| or a society of people with the _potential_ to to be
| creative, passionate, and exploratory?
|
| Conversely to you, I find it hard to imagine that a society
| with surplus wealth would be more effective if it chose to
| subject its people to precarity and emotional strife instead
| of empowering as many of its people as possible.
|
| Some references: https://www.epi.org/publication/charting-
| wage-stagnation/ https://www.statista.com/chart/25574/living-
| wage-vs-minimum-...
| jay_kyburz wrote:
| Why not just have unemployment benefits or new enterprise
| grants? Why do you need UBI?
|
| Here in Australia there is quite a bit of money floating
| around for those people with passions and potential. I've
| received quite a bit over the years taking chances, some of
| it as grants, some as government investments.
|
| I've been fortunate and never had to rely on unemployment
| benifits, but I always knew in the back of my mind it was
| available if I fail. Soon I'll be able to fall back on my
| aged care benefits :)
| jltsiren wrote:
| Unemployment benefits and other income-dependent benefits
| are a strong incentive against working, unless the job
| pays particularly well. It's common that the effective
| tax rate for low-paying jobs is 80-90%, if you count lost
| benefits in addition to taxes. Sometime the rate exceeds
| 100%. In order to get unemployed people back to work
| against their own interests, unemployment benefits often
| come with strict time limits, a lot of surveillance and
| bureaucracy, and a general loss of dignity.
|
| The "basic" in UBI aims to solve that by changing
| benefits and taxes. Everyone from the homeless to the
| billionaires gets the same benefits, while income taxes
| will make sure that most people won't see any additional
| money. The differences are only seen by people with low
| incomes. While the benefits may be a little lower, taking
| a low-paying job makes much more sense, as your tax rate
| may be as low as 40%.
|
| Many old-school unions oppose UBI because it makes low-
| paying jobs more viable. They consider it morally wrong.
| According to them, if you work full time, the employer
| should pay you enough that you don't need any government
| handouts for a dignified live.
| jay_kyburz wrote:
| Id love to understand how unemployment benefits
| discourage working more than a UBI. Either you need to
| work to survive or you don't.
|
| I've read some comments here recently that suggests
| people feel like they have a right to a nice life after
| being born. As I get older I see humans more like any
| other animal born into an uncaring universe out in
| nature. You have to get out of that borrow, hunt and
| forage to survive. It's not the responsibility of every
| other human to have food delivered to your burrow.
| agumonkey wrote:
| I believe UBI would require a few external attractors /
| motivators to avoid people being dilluted in choice and fuzzy
| self actualization path.
| HideousKojima wrote:
| >How could that, possibly, be sustainable or even good?
|
| It isn't. Like most magical thinking economic proposals, it's
| simply a matter of ignoring reality.
|
| "In the Carboniferous Epoch we were promised abundance for
| all, By robbing selected Peter to pay for collective Paul;
| But, though we had plenty of money, there was nothing our
| money could buy, And the Gods of the Copybook Headings said:
| "If you don't work you die.""
|
| ...
|
| "And that after this is accomplished, and the brave new world
| begins When all men are paid for existing and no man must pay
| for his sins, As surely as Water will wet us, as surely as
| Fire will burn, The Gods of the Copybook Headings with terror
| and slaughter return!"
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Gods_of_the_Copybook_Hea.
| ..
| scott_w wrote:
| Minimum wage and UBI aren't the same thing so you can't
| extrapolate the results of one into the other.
| Tade0 wrote:
| Who said minimum wage didn't work? It works, provided you
| adjust its value regularly.
|
| Anyway, I've met a few people who, through a combination of
| welfare and inherited wealth don't really have to work.
|
| While most are simply living their best life spending time on
| unprofitable hobbies like photography one example stands out
| as he's currently busy driving into Ukraine and back with
| supplies for the people there.
|
| What I'm getting at is that in reality we don't actually know
| what would happen under UBI. Maybe more children would be
| born, as another example from my list is currently a father
| and (to the best of my knowledge) still jobless?
| authorfly wrote:
| I do have a different opinion to you, and it was formed during
| the pandemic when there were UBI-like circumstances for me and
| my friend group. Those who didn't need to work any more, became
| rather depressed, quite quickly, compared to those who kept
| working. And it changed my view on UBI. Maybe in your friend
| group that was different or your country didn't follow such an
| approach?
|
| What's the difference between working on several games or
| focusing and finished one to you?
|
| Would you work on these things enough to produce finished
| projects if you had UBI? For more than a while?
|
| I think at some life stages, like parenthood or childhood, UBI
| makes sense. At others, when you are finding yourself - having
| a responsibility is useful.
| scottLobster wrote:
| That's why in the sci-fi, utopian economics of the Star Trek
| Federation they have a "participation based" UBI, where your
| ticket to the Federation's generous UBI (made possible by
| effectively infinite material resources) is contingent upon
| you doing something productive. You can't just sit on your
| ass all day and collect it.
|
| Now how they measure/judge what's "productive" and the fact
| that it works at all is what makes it sci-fi, but it
| highlights that responsibility is critical, even in a utopia.
| fragmede wrote:
| UBI is a failure of imagination for jobs programs. Don't
| get me wrong, as a society we should take care of everyone
| so that no one dies of starvation or freezes to death, but
| don't just give people handouts, pay people to do stuff.
| Even something as simple as planting trees.
| vineyardmike wrote:
| I think jobs programs are a failure of society to imagine
| what true abundance looks like, and how abundant our
| lives are.
|
| In the US, we produce and throw away so much food that
| _overconsumption_ is vastly more deadly than
| _underconsumption_. Hell, we even put corn ethanol into
| our petro products just to keep the farmland in use.
|
| We could have "universal basic food stamps" pretty much
| immediately. Affordably too - society is collectively
| already paying for a multiple of all consumption needs
| (just out of pocket instead of via government subsidy).
| People could work for extra income for their specialty
| foods.
| 01HNNWZ0MV43FF wrote:
| Slate Star Codex made an argument against it here
| https://www.slatestarcodexabridged.com/Basic-Income-Not-
| Basi...
|
| It's been a few years but my recollection is something
| like:
|
| 1. The jobs that are crappy enough for jobs programs are
| not useful jobs to be done anyway.
|
| 2. The overhead involved in having a job (Transportation,
| childcare, all kinds of second-order negatives on your
| life) can easily outweigh shitty salaries. Also jobs
| programs would be worse for people with kids, unless you
| add more child tax credit to prop up that side of the
| stool.
|
| 3. Having a job takes away free time that otherwise could
| be used for training or education. Planting trees by hand
| in the sun is not going to look like anything on anyone's
| resume. You could put another leg on the stool by having
| a college grant program or something, but it's another
| step away from jobs and towards UBI
|
| If you're going to pay people to do something pointless,
| maybe just pay them to exist anyway?
| JoshTriplett wrote:
| > pay people to do stuff
|
| UBI allows people to choose _what_ stuff they consider
| productive. UBI means anyone can work on a startup, or
| try to start a project, or try an artistic endeavor, or
| do research. UBI means _everyone_ can afford to take some
| risks and still have a fallback plan.
| philwelch wrote:
| Star Trek mostly just kind of handwaves this sort of thing
| rather than actually explaining how it works, which is
| probably the right narrative decision because it's usually
| beside whatever point the story is trying to make.
| HideousKojima wrote:
| Star Trek handwaves away pretty much all questions about
| its utopian economics. What's the point in Picard's family
| owning a vineyard in a world with replicators that can make
| perfectly aged wine for you in seconds?
| hindsightbias wrote:
| So in Star Trek artisinal work/projects would not exist?
| spockz wrote:
| I think that almost every episode featuring food from
| replicators always has someone lamenting that it isn't
| the real thing though. So tastes vary. There is
| tradition. Point enough to have a be vineyard.
| largbae wrote:
| Also, what if _everyone_ wants a vineyard in France? Land
| is still finite, how does one allocate something like
| that?
| ericjmorey wrote:
| Interesting that I observed the opposite. During the pandemic
| people I know who had to work were sent into extreme
| psychological dysfunction that they're still dealing with the
| fallout that followed. Those that didn't need to work
| flourished.
| jchw wrote:
| > Those who didn't need to work any more, became rather
| depressed, quite quickly, compared to those who kept working.
|
| I'm going to be completely honest with you, I really think
| you need to consider other reasons why people might be
| depressed in the situation that occurred during the pandemic.
| I don't know anyone who was doing particularly well,
| including those working (heck, people at my job at the time
| were struggling pretty badly with mental health to the point
| where they started reaching out to us.)
|
| I'm not even saying this as a person that has a strong
| opinion on UBI, and I am sure some people sincerely believe
| not having a job was a major detriment for them. I absolutely
| think it did help me, but the way I see it, it helped because
| it was something to cling onto for a bit of normalcy, and of
| course, a bit of social interaction. Outside of the pandemic,
| a job is not nearly as critical for those two things.
|
| I also do personally think that I still broadly like having a
| job, and I have had almost no gaps in employment since I
| started working professionally. That said, if money were no
| object, I would absolutely take breaks off of professional
| work for months at a time. For me, I find both professional
| work and hobby work important in very different ways, and
| wish I had dedicated time for both. Anecdotally I've
| definitely known engineers who periodically take months or
| even a year off of work when they get the opportunity and it
| seems to be a very healthy thing for them.
|
| The existence of UBI would maybe tempt people to rely on it
| even if it is detrimental to their lives, but I think it's
| wrong to draw the conclusion that it's bad because jobs can
| be a source of fulfillment for many. In the future it's very
| possible we're going to need to approach the problem from
| another angle anyways, since there's simply no guarantee
| there will be meaningful work for us all in the future. (I'm
| not really convinced there _won 't_ be, but it feels
| unreasonable to consider it outside the realm of reasonable
| possibility.)
| jay_kyburz wrote:
| There is not doubt in my mind that if we somehow
| implemented a UBI in a way that would not just result in
| inflation of rent and everyday goods, the vast majority of
| people would simply stop working, get bored, depressed, and
| more likely go looking for mischief before they started
| working on useful or interesting hobby projects.
|
| Whats more, if you drop out of work to live on the UBI, by
| definition, you are the poorest person in the country, and
| if that is not a reason to be depressed I don't know what
| is.
| smcleod wrote:
| Except the research shows almost exactly the opposite?
| brulard wrote:
| can you elaborate?
| jonhohle wrote:
| Research doesn't show the government providing cheap or
| free money doesn't inflate prices? We've just lived
| through four years of insane government spending
| correlated with the highest inflation in over 40 years.
|
| This is an experiment that has been tried and always has
| the same results: the cost of an item increases by
| approximately the amount of the subsidy the government
| provides. UBI experiments "work" because they are
| elevating the income of a small portion of the population
| above their peers. It's not actually universal.
| talldayo wrote:
| > the cost of an item increases by approximately the
| amount of the subsidy the government provides.
|
| Vis-a-vis food stamps and unemployment checks, I don't
| think you can draw the correlation you think exists.
| Particularly past a certain level of poverty, the state
| ends up spending _more_ to manage the consequences of
| unemployment than it saves by refusing to fix it. UBI in
| this case perpetuates inequity but it also greases the
| wheels of a down-and-out working population that can be
| motivated by higher standards of living.
|
| From a net-gain perspective, developed nations investing
| in themselves like this makes sense. The alternative is
| letting the middle class rot, which is something that
| only the upper-class would stand to gain from.
| JoshTriplett wrote:
| > Research doesn't show the government providing cheap or
| free money doesn't inflate prices?
|
| The post being replied to said:
|
| > There is not doubt in my mind that if we somehow
| implemented a UBI in a way that would not just result in
| inflation of rent and everyday goods, the vast majority
| of people would simply stop working, get bored,
| depressed, and more likely go looking for mischief before
| they started working on useful or interesting hobby
| projects.
|
| So, the response saying that the research doesn't support
| that conclusion is not about the "that would not just
| result in" there, it's about countering the remainder of
| that point. Most people will not choose to do absolutely
| nothing. (And if some people do, _that 's fine_!)
|
| That's separate from the many arguments that UBI is not
| inherently inflationary, which neither the post you
| replied to or the post _it_ replied to were making.
| 01HNNWZ0MV43FF wrote:
| So there's always inevitably at least one poorest person
| in the country who is automatically depressed? Omelas is
| a law of nature?
| jchw wrote:
| Well, the way I see it, there is a real possibility that
| we're going to have to figure out what to do after that
| happens some day. There's no fundamental law of nature
| that guarantees we'll have enough work to keep the vast
| majority of people working.
|
| It already feels like many of the jobs that exist today
| are bullshit, and knowing that your job is bullshit is
| not exactly good for your mental health, either.
| boerseth wrote:
| I doubt it was the UBI-like aspect of the pandemic that
| caused the depressive states. Isolation, less active
| lifestyles, locked inside. Imagine UBI, but with the opposite
| of all of those!
| andai wrote:
| I expect that advances in AI and robotics will make most
| human labor obsolete (economically unviable) in the next few
| decades. I expect widespread adoption of UBI as a
| consequence.
|
| I have also considered the fact that most people just sort of
| "drift" if there isn't an external system forcing them to
| stay on track. I suspect we're going to see "fake jobs"
| subsidized by the system for the sake of maintaining
| widespread sanity.
|
| Well fake jobs isn't quite the right name, rather they'd be
| real jobs but a portion of the UBI budget (or wherever it
| comes from) would be spent maintaining a human economy for
| the people (most people?) who apparently require such a
| system to stay sane. I say fake because they wouldn't be
| economically viable without the subsidy.
| andai wrote:
| Of course, work isn't the only way to stay busy or sane. I
| think we'll also see a lot more hobby groups and general
| community gatherings.
| szundi wrote:
| As others commented there can be a dozen other reason to be
| depressed under the pandemic other than UBI like revenues.
|
| Also UBI does not stop you from doing work. UBI does not want
| to be a complete replacement of work related revenues, just
| the basic needs are covered. So if you have a minimum of
| ambition, you'll go for a job. UBI is just your safety net,
| so you must not become something that you feel is a slave or
| stuck in with bad people just to pay rent. Quite different
| story compared to what you painted here like people just
| don't work. Also would be interesting to see this unfolding
| for 10 years. Maybe humans are just lazy but quite the
| opposite can happen as well and those stories will drag
| people along. Of course some of us are going to fuck it up
| that's for sure.
| fshbbdssbbgdd wrote:
| Does UBI pay enough to support a ski bum lifestyle? That's
| probably what I would do if I had guaranteed income with no
| job.
| nawgz wrote:
| > UBI-like circumstances for me and my friend group
|
| > during the pandemic
|
| Lol you really think generalizing emotional states from a
| global lockdown is smart?
| itsthecourier wrote:
| Super honest feedback on UBI. I'm glad we saw it develop
| before us with COVID, there is something there that may work,
| but simple UBI doesn't work evidently
| gwervc wrote:
| UBI won't work: it's almost implemented in my country (you can
| get 600EUR/month + many other welfare stuff by not working) and
| what's the result? Highest public deficit in the EU zone,
| highest tax rate in the world, rampant criminality, difficulty
| to get money by working because of said taxes, educated people
| leaving the country in mass, etc.
| mikabasketball wrote:
| France?
| romeros wrote:
| Reality #1: Universal Basic Income (UBI) will empower people
| to break free from the grind of work. They'll have the
| freedom to start innovative companies, create art, make
| music, learn to dance, and generally enjoy happier, less
| stressful lives.
|
| Reality #2: Alternatively, many might find themselves stuck
| at home, glued to their screens. This could lead to boredom
| and depression, resulting in online trolling and petty
| arguments. Some may even resort to crime out of frustration.
| wk_end wrote:
| What you're describing isn't UBI; it's just traditional
| welfare. UBI advocates are aware of problems with welfare and
| believe that UBI wouldn't suffer from the same issues.
| jonhohle wrote:
| No true Scotsman
| wk_end wrote:
| > No true Scotsman or appeal to purity is an informal
| fallacy in which one attempts to protect an a posteriori
| claim from a falsifying counterexample by covertly
| modifying the initial claim.
|
| No one has covertly modified the initial claim. UBI has a
| long-standing definition that's distinct from welfare.
| largbae wrote:
| Why not though? The money has to come from somewhere. Why
| would UBI not tremendously raise taxes and thereby
| undermine the incentive to work just as GP observes?
| wk_end wrote:
| There's actually two ways that the situation described
| above undermines the incentive to work.
|
| The first is that - and this is one of the key
| distinctions - welfare programs are means-tested whereas
| UBI is (as the name implies) universal: everyone gets it
| whether they're working or need it or not. The post above
| says "you can get 600EUR/month + many other welfare stuff
| by not working"; if you lose that welfare by starting to
| work, this hugely incentivizes not working! Worse still,
| it incentivizes black market labour - money earned under
| the table isn't going to be counted against your means-
| testing. This is at best productive but untaxed, at worst
| actively destructive or criminal.
|
| The other is, as you've pointed out, high taxation. I
| believe the UBI advocate's response to this would be some
| combination of: 1) UBI will supersede a multitude of
| complex, means-tested welfare programs and will be
| cheaper to administer as well, so the increase to
| taxation won't be as substantial as you might imagine; 2)
| giving people freedom to pursue
| education/creativity/entrepeneurship, UBI will spur on
| economic growth that will help it pay for itself (as
| would disincentivizing black market labour, as described
| above); and 3) the extent to which taxation
| disincentivizes productivity is overstated, or is perhaps
| contingent on the particular taxation scheme, and they
| support one that they think won't have deleterious
| effects.
|
| FWIW I personally suspect UBI would be a pretty good
| idea, but I'm at least a little skeptical about some of
| these arguments as I understand them; nevertheless,
| various people who've studied the issue extensively and
| with a stronger background in economics buy them, so I
| accept that they're at least worth taking seriously.
| norir wrote:
| Abandoning things is essential to development. If we didn't let
| things go, we'd be stuck with all of our weaker ideas. That
| doesn't mean they are bad or a waste of time, but rather you
| reach a point at which you realize there is something better you
| could be doing and move on. This can be painful but it's
| necessary.
|
| I keep beating this drum but I believe there is a significant
| amount of pain in software because people shipped first drafts
| and got stuck with foundational design issues. Once this has gone
| on long enough, even a greenfield rewrite is hard because both
| the programmers and the users have internalized the flawed
| design.
| perrygeo wrote:
| And in many cases the entire org chart has been built around
| the first draft. It's psychologically hard for developers and
| for people paying the bills to throw stuff away, so we often
| dig in our heals and accept the first solution that works,
| along with the tech debt and resulting pain.
|
| Now the drum I keep beating is - software process needs a
| design phase. You need some plan, some coherent vision of the
| architecture, otherwise you get a system held together with
| duct tape and prayers.
|
| Agile made it fashionable to sprint ahead without any coherent
| plan.
|
| Waterfall obsessed about the plan and failed to adapt to new
| circumstances.
|
| There has to be somewhere in the middle where a design is
| subject to empirical testing. We have to change the design
| based on results of running real code. In other words, when the
| first draft doesn't work quite right, you don't ignore it
| (Agile) or try to shoehorn it into the existing design
| (Waterfall) - you change the design and try again. "Throwing
| stuff away" could be reframed as the scientific method. This
| needs to be normalized as a part of the process so we remove
| the stigma of "failed" experiments, which are not failures but
| valuable sources of information that improve the final product.
| hirvi74 wrote:
| I'm not sure I am all for abandoning all projects, but I do
| remember reading a comment on this very website that really
| resonated with me.
|
| Someone was complaining about always starting projects, but never
| finishing said projects.
|
| To paraphrase another user's response, it was something like,
| "Not all projects need to be finished in order for value to be
| gained. To borrow a concept from Buddhism, perhaps you found what
| you were looking for all along?"
| doublerabbit wrote:
| Mines just time. I get home from work, the last thing I want to
| do is sit in front of my computer.
|
| With two days off a week to fulfil with chores, I still don't
| want to sit in front of a computer screen.
| jimkoen wrote:
| I'm a junior, currently trying to get an internship and
| subsequent job.
|
| I envy anyone that can do what you do. At the moment it feels
| like the industry is a cult, only looking for people that make
| tech and programming their entire life. I don't even mind the
| requirements, I have a work ethic and want to perform well, but
| the expectations seem higher than ever.
|
| I'm looking forward to finally having enough job security for a
| hobby that doesn't involve staring at computer screens (hoping
| to get into metal work soon).
| pton_xd wrote:
| Personally I've learned (and earned) way more by shipping small
| things and THEN iterating on them. Or abandoning them.
| dietrichepp wrote:
| I've been going back and working on retro development. These
| days, making software for the 68K Macintosh, which is where I
| learned to program in the first place. I dug a lot through old
| books, comp.sys.mac.programmer posts, and the source code from
| Soft Dorothy and others (like the GliderPro source).
|
| It's a trip seeing this old code through new eyes. I can see why
| the old Macs crashed so much (beyond the basic "they had no
| memory protection" explanation). I'm also fond of the 1-bit art,
| like the author mentions, and I curate a list of accounts on
| Twitter which post 1-but artwork (if you know anybody who's
| missing from the list, let me know):
| https://twitter.com/i/lists/1578111923324944397
|
| The nice thing about programming for a limited system is that it
| limits your options. It's a nice break from the more modern
| experience where you can do _anything_ by pulling in the right
| library. I sometimes imagine a world where computational power is
| frozen, and we simple get better and better software for systems
| that are well-understood. The thing about these old systems like
| the Mac 68K machines is that the pace of hardware development was
| so fast it made you dizzy. If a new processor came out like the
| 68020 or 80386, then you had maybe a couple years at most to make
| something that really used it to its full potential. If you
| waited too long, you'd be competing against a new generation of
| software written for a new generation of hardware.
| jujube3 wrote:
| The new Google motto?
| pphysch wrote:
| Sure, why not. It's a good approach for innovation.
| mynameyeff wrote:
| Dad??
| tkiolp4 wrote:
| Many companies I have worked for operate like this. Engineers get
| to work on shiny new features, they get released, everyone is
| happy. Months later tons of bugs accumulate. The original authors
| are already part of another team (because "breaking silos", but
| actually because "make everyone replaceable"). The engineers that
| inherit the project need to maintain it and fix the bugs until
| another team takes over.
|
| It's awful.
| anon7725 wrote:
| I drew a comparison between "iterate and fail fast" vs "lots of
| upfront design" as a personal process, rather than a company's
| modus operandi. For instance someone might do 2 or 3 prototypes
| when tasked with delivering a certain feature in order to
| explore the problem space.
| trentnix wrote:
| Such is the hellscape we've brought on ourselves from the
| widespread adoption of "minimum viable product" as the right
| way to build things. We judge viability by some feature set,
| not whether the stupid thing is resilient or can be maintained.
|
| It also doesn't help that "minimum viable" is only one step
| away from "non-viable". Every project then becomes like Icarus,
| testing how close to the sun we can fly before our wings melt.
| sweezyjeezy wrote:
| But what's the alternative here? "We spent longer than was
| minimally viable but we still don't have a good idea if it
| has market fit"-product? In my experience the code usually
| gets binned whether the idea gets traction or not. Some
| companies misjudge when to rewrite, but that doesn't make the
| MVP part of the process wrong.
|
| The absolute greatest wastes of talent and humanity I've ever
| seen in tech didn't come from tech debt, those efforts were
| almost always at least working on a product that people were
| paying money for. The biggest wastes were from over-
| delivering products that hadn't and were never going to
| succeed.
| mind_heist wrote:
| completely correct, but I dont think thats where OP is coming
| from or what the article intends to suggest either. Its
| recommending that you try multiple things, get a feel for whats
| technically feasible & if it looks interesting to the customer
| and push that forward. Its very well applicable to indie devs &
| also applicable to large companies to some extent. This
| philosophy is great to identify the feature/product you want to
| spend meaningful time on.
|
| In fact, one could wager that the situation you described is
| directly a consequence of not adhering to what OP is
| suggesting.
| srpablo wrote:
| I often joke that every startup job post Series A is you
| playing Viscera Cleanup Detail[1] for the "heroes" of the pre-
| PMF stage
|
| [1]:
| https://store.steampowered.com/app/246900/Viscera_Cleanup_De...
| konfusinomicon wrote:
| having been the original author on a company defining feature
| and then told that the silo must be broken only to see my work
| stepped on for years to come i wholeheartedly agree. the
| inheritors not qualified to make the decisions, my grand ideas
| pushed to the side, and having watched the incompetance in
| managing said feature has been a hard thing to overcome and im
| still salty about it every time a stupid bug arises. especially
| when warnings were raised with ample time to adjust. but i
| learned an important lesson and i can say with certaintly that
| i wont hesitate to be perceived as an asshole and die on hills
| about it the next time
| munificent wrote:
| John, your games were an inspiration to me when I was a kid first
| learning my way around programming on the Mac. I spent a lot of
| time playing Glider and even more playing Pararena. I still have
| the echo-y startup sample of that lodged in my head.
|
| I probably spent even more time poking around in the resource
| forks of your games in ResEdit.
|
| I didn't finish much, but I did complete a couple of little
| shareware games and uploaded them to AOL. I was beyond surprised
| when a check from far away California appeared in my mailbox many
| months later.
|
| Those early Mac days really did feel like a special time where
| anything was possible a solo developer could make a thing and put
| it out into the world without needing more than creativity and
| time.
|
| Thank you for writing these posts and sending me down memory
| lane. I hope you're enjoying your retirement.
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| Maybe you read some of the other posts of mine (or the README's
| for the disk image repos). It was a special time.
|
| Was it special because it was all new to us as early computer-
| users, early developers? Or was there something different in
| the air back then....
|
| I'm glad you liked the little games I wrote.
|
| Was it the check from California that pushed you into your
| current career (whatever that is)?
| chr15m wrote:
| this is the way
| screaminghawk wrote:
| I love this but I approach it a bit differently. I don't think
| this is a good excuse to write bad or unmaintainable code. Sure
| some shortcuts are fine but it should be useful for the next
| person.
|
| Personally I try to use free hosting services so that I don't
| have to pay to keep it running when I abandon it. (That could be
| AWS free tier or blockchain or IPFS etc). Use a public repository
| so someone else can find it when it's inevitable dropped. I
| always make sure to have good documentation so that once it's
| found anyone can get it running.
| jongjong wrote:
| When I read articles like this, I feel nostalgia and envy. Why
| was I not born 10 years earlier? I see other people in my
| industry who are 10 years older than me and they not only had a
| way more fulfilling career, they are much better off financially
| too. It's like everything fell on their lap.
| ang_cire wrote:
| Move Fast and Abandon Things: The Google Story
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