This is such a good explanation of why I have a hard time working with folks who always approach technical problems with the attitude of "why don't we just do this?"
It's the just that gets me. They are too action-oriented to think about the details or ask someone who's done it before, so they start down the path of (to use the author's metaphor) buying cheap lumber and calculating the angles for cutting the stair boards. They follow through with that and finish the rest of the stairs with the same attitude.
Now the stairs are finished and installed (shipped) - they look terrible, they're wobbly and too steep and everyone who walks on them in either direction trips. Then begins the never-ending process of in-place improvements: using a sander to even out the angles, grinding down the too-long screws that stick up, pounding on warped boards to straighten them out. We can't fix the angle or the poor spacing of the steps though, because everyone's gotten perversely used to it.
When the whole house gets built this way, you live in a perpetual fixer-upper, where each component is either under revision or you've settled for it being "good enough" until enough work has been done to make everything else a little less broken.
> This is such a good explanation of why I have a hard time working with folks who always approach technical problems with the attitude of "why don't we just do this?"
The flip side of this are the people who can’t accomplish anything novel because they’re unable to simply try. At some point you have to “just” do it.
You can do research and seek out advice, and indeed you should. But for most things, you will not develop a perfect understanding or solution without jumping in and finding the practical gaps in your knowledge. You generally will have gaps and you can spend infinite time trying to fill them. Or you can learn enough to start and understand that you will likely make mistakes and learn along the way.
I’ve never done anything substantial that didn’t involve mistakes. Every major new system I’ve built had mistakes. Every home project I’ve done has imperfections that annoy me. Not once have I completed something substantial and novel and then said I’d do it exactly the same if I were doing it again. That only happens for things I’ve done repeatedly so I learn the optimal way to get it done. Build one deck and you’ll screw up at least three things. Build a dozen and you’ll get it down to a consistent product.
This is of course why trades have apprenticeship programs. You can screw up stairs a dozen times and eventually figure out all the details you missed, or you can work with someone to learn to do it correctly more efficiently. The person you’re learning from can probably fix your errors, too, so the end product is better than you’d have produced.
Yea but the guy that just gets things done is always completing his projects and exceeding his quarterly goals. So he keeps getting assigned all the new exciting high visibility projects. Managers and execs like him more because he's not always saying no at meetings. He gets promoted or switches jobs before his hacks break down too much. And you're the one left carefully maintaining all the projects he blazed through.
"Why don't we just do this?" is incredibly valuable as long as it's not simply saying "We should do this!"
If your building a house the best volume to surface area is going to be a sphere. Why don't we use that? Well it's a pain to work with curves. Well why not a Cube? It _
That _ is going to be a listing of the problems constraints, which most people can't simply list by thinking abstractly.
This misses OP's point completely--they're talking about the people who will use pieces of cardboard to fill pits in the earth and make the railing way too high because that's how long they happened to cut the boards. In my experience, these have indeed always been the people who hastily say, "Let's just do this!" instead of asking, "What do you have to do here?"
You might be saying this in jest but his statement is totally valid if he is a manager.
The level of abstraction you are working on matters. A manager can't just build a great business either. But for example if he encounters legal trouble, he can just hire lawyers to fix it.
His interface to the world is via delegation to people who can solve his subproblems competently and consistently. There's still a "surprising amount of detail" but at a higher abstraction level and solved with different tools(a really strong "biological" AI that can resolve and prevent the details from bubbling up :P).
It's the just that gets me. They are too action-oriented to think about the details or ask someone who's done it before, so they start down the path of (to use the author's metaphor) buying cheap lumber and calculating the angles for cutting the stair boards. They follow through with that and finish the rest of the stairs with the same attitude.
Now the stairs are finished and installed (shipped) - they look terrible, they're wobbly and too steep and everyone who walks on them in either direction trips. Then begins the never-ending process of in-place improvements: using a sander to even out the angles, grinding down the too-long screws that stick up, pounding on warped boards to straighten them out. We can't fix the angle or the poor spacing of the steps though, because everyone's gotten perversely used to it.
When the whole house gets built this way, you live in a perpetual fixer-upper, where each component is either under revision or you've settled for it being "good enough" until enough work has been done to make everything else a little less broken.