> The company quite literally has the words "get sh*t done" in giant neon letters on their office wall.
That has become one of my red flag. I want to deal with people and companies focused on the quality of their products and businesses, not on doing "shit" (taking their motto literally).
Absolutely. "Move fast and break things" is barely acceptable for services where failure is mostly just annoying, like social media. If your product is banking, medicine, transport, or anything else that can seriously harm people, "move fast and break things" amounts to criminal negligence.
Another example of a field that I'm personally aware of and in which this kind of attitude should not be acceptable is cybersecurity. If your job is to protect people, then EVERYTHING you release has to be bulletproof.
As someone in cybersecurity, I would offer an alternate perspective: That sometimes you have to lock things down despite not being absolutely certain of side effects, being willing to take some outages, if you ever expect to get something done.
Analysis Paralysis is a real thing. Sometimes you just have to do it.
Choosing to lock things down when you're not certain of the side effects... that's the sort of thing that will, at worst, cause outages due to protocol access or authentication (which are both easily fixable). It's a smart move... and helps initiate the "Canary in the coalmine" built-in feature.
The "move fast and break things" crowd are generally the same people that will choose to open things up in the name of "getting shit done". They'll drop firewalls, expose services publicly, and generally go out of their way to avoid security because they see it as a hurdle to achieving their primary goal. In my experience, this lack of foresight almost always causes cascading problems in the future that grow exponentially worse the longer they're left unchecked.
"Well at Google, they'd use a global distributed fault tolerant Hadoop cluster for their data store." "Dude??? We're building a Wordpress site. We're gonna run MySQL on the same shared server as the php code."
While I'm not a big fan of Atlassian's software - I did end up in their old offices for various hackerspace related meetups a long time back.
They had a big sign on the wall "Don't fuck the customer."
That's a much better ethos that "move fast and break things", or "Get shit done" in my mind... (Even if it is just performative customer facing propaganda, at least it shows that management understands that's a key requirement customers want to be told they'll meet...)
And after reading about their work culture, I also don't tend to trust companies that grind their employees down and spit them out. Banking is high pressure at the best of times, but reading about how they work doesn't fill me with confidence in their quality.
"Move fast and break things" is my red flag. I kind of get it for early start-ups in, say, the social media space where the phrase was coined. But when I hear it remotely connected to health care, or critical data, I cringe. I even cringe when I hear it applied to Facebook now, now that it's de-facto a communications platform and whether we like it or not it is depended on by people for important communications and things they are led to believe are private.
Don't move fast and break things. Move productively and build things.
the first startup i worked at had a 'get shit done' poster on one of the walls. I think it was more of a fellowkids thing, meant to be half serious/funny and looked more like cargo-culting a startupy phrase.
it was a great place to work - engineering was pretty lax, most of us were there only from 10-4.
That has become one of my red flag. I want to deal with people and companies focused on the quality of their products and businesses, not on doing "shit" (taking their motto literally).