
"Fail fast" is no excuse for being a moron, flake or scumbag - michaelochurch
http://michaelochurch.wordpress.com/2012/04/08/fail-fast-is-not-an-excuse-for-being-a-moron-a-flake-or-a-scumbag/
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Silhouette
I'm sorry, I really did try to read this because it sounded like it might
interesting, but it's well over 2.5K words and by about halfway through I
still had no idea what it was really about. I skipped down to the final
paragraph and that still didn't seem to tell me. May I respectfully suggest
that future posts this long have a one-line or at least one-paragraph summary
at the top?

~~~
andywood
I think it's more than the lack of a summary. The whole essay could really
benefit from a lot more editing and tightening up.

~~~
michaelochurch
I agree. I'm outraged and disgusted by things I've seen over the past 12
months-- some have happened to me, most to other people-- and it's really
affecting the quality of my writing.

~~~
rhizome
A classic technique is to allow someone else to read the essay before
publishing it.

~~~
michaelochurch
I agree with you. Usually I put 1-2 months before writing a blog post/essay
and posting it. I just see this matter as a bit more urgent, as I really want
to see the American Spring (the 2012 campaign of people calling out unethical
behaviors at companies, rather than protecting scummy ex-employers) happen.

Words-of-prose can be like lines-of-code: beyond about 500, it takes a long
process of review not to have some degree of mess.

------
paulsutter
I really like the motivating idea behind this post, and read all the way
through for that reason. It has some good points (the 30/60/90 PIP example),
but it's hard to remember the key points.

As a fan of the idea, I hope you can spend a little more time to tighten it up
and add some more concrete examples (some of the points seemed a little hard
for me to picture concretely).

~~~
michaelochurch
I guess the key point is: a lot of people are using "fail fast" as an excuse
for behaviors that previous generations would consider frankly irresponsible,
if not unethical, and I think the general element of scumbaggery that we've
seen in technology of late is a result of this absurd ideology.

~~~
jpdoctor
> * that previous generations would consider frankly irresponsible, if not
> unethical*

Both in this article and the "ethical crisis" link therein
([http://michaelochurch.wordpress.com/2012/04/07/an-ethical-
cr...](http://michaelochurch.wordpress.com/2012/04/07/an-ethical-crisis-in-
technology/)) makes me think you are young and new to the game.

Very unethical and irresponsible behavior has been around a long time.
Internet Bubble v1.0 had a world of crap going on, with much bigger dollar-
numbers for the investments.

~~~
michaelochurch
I was born in 1983, so I missed the first Bubble, but I believe you. I worked
for someone (also a total sleaze) who had a late-1990s startup and once spent
close to $2 million (out of about $15m on hand) on a launch party. Over 10% of
working capital on a party _before a product existed_. So I'm well-acquainted
with the fact that there was at least some sleaze in the first bubble.

I guess I'm crestfallen because I thought, at least over the past decade, that
most of the sleaze would be in finance. I'm finding that not to be so.

I don't care about being a billionaire "master of the universe" as long as I
don't have to be within 500 meters of the type of slime that does care about
that shit. I just want to fucking work, to solve hard problems, to add value
to the world, and to make enough money to have a good life. If I get rich,
great. If I solve important problems and don't get rich, fine. That was the
appeal of "tech" over finance, but now I see that the same sleaze has crept
into our world too, and I want it out.

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jroseattle
I agree with the general principle, which I've summed up as: "fail fast" is
often a cocktail-party excuse for reckless approaches to management.

To the OP: I'm relatively an echo chamber for the other comments here. The
article qualifies as tl;dr; and would be much more effective with editing.
However, I disagree with others that you go the journalism route; it's a blog,
and journalism's standards of "we report, you decide" is about facts, not
passion. That will turn some people off, but it won't be ambiguous about your
intentions.

Keep at it.

~~~
michaelochurch
_"fail fast" is often a cocktail-party excuse for reckless approaches to
management._

Well said, and there are ethical reasons why this is unacceptable.

Tech demos are supposed to be scrappy. Minimum viable product. Twitter put up
a fail whale early in its lifespan. So what? I don't think anyone's career
relied on it being 100% reliable, and anyone who did bet his career on such a
thing was being reckless. Twitter did the right thing by getting something
good enough out there and iterating.

Management affects too many people for that approach to be tolerable. You have
to actually know what you're doing before you act.

------
eli_gottlieb
_Most of us in venture-funded technology are merely bankers, except for the
distinction that we buy and sell internet ads instead of securities._

Thank you for finally calling them out.

------
demian
In an enviroment where people hate failure, the slogan "fail fast" can help to
"tip de balance" to a more iterative and feedback-oriented kind of managment.
BUT, when the balance has basically reached the other end, the "slogan" looses
it's purpose (because people start failing "too much").

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jnt8686
I liked this one especially: "On the other hand, a remnant of the flat-out
elitist, aristocratic mindset that we have to kill the shit out of every
couple hundred years (cf. French Revolution) is the concept that investors,
socially speaking, deserve to outrank employees."

~~~
srl
French Revolution is probably a bad example if he's going for "couple hundred
years". Y'know, because there were three, in sixty years.

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scrame
I completely agree with the sentiment, and appreciate the emotional tone.

Instead of a tl;dr summary, I think you could actually make a separate, short-
attention-span style infographic with the salient points, and have a potent
long-form as well.

Anyway, good piece! Its more important to keep writing than make every post
perfect (its better to get a C in a class than never finish your A+ paper).

This one deserves a spit shine _.

_ <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spit_shine>

------
michaelochurch
No idea if I'm taking the most effective approach here, but these ethical
discussions are long overdue and I really hope they'll occur.

~~~
hluska
If you strip out some personal bitterness and spent some serious time with a
scorched earth editor, this could be a very effective treatise on the state of
ethics and corporate responsibility in the technology industry. You touch on
some interesting concepts that deserve thought...

Alas, phrases like "snot-nosed kids", "Google's douche-tsunami" and "little
sociopath" betray both personal bias and anger. Phrases like these make it too
easy to dismiss this article as little more than a rant.

I believe that if you're going to call out an industry on ethics, you have to
pursue the article as a journalist would. Keep your personal feelings under
wraps, tell the whole story and leave the conclusions to your readers. When it
comes to proving a point and convincing people to change, passionate
journalism always trumps passion on its own.

~~~
michaelochurch
I think I'm going to tighten it up later today.

As for phrases like "little sociopath", I want to call people to action on
this sort of thing. I want people I've never met to call out and halt their
own little sociopaths.

I call out Google because it was once a great company, and billions of dollars
of value within in it has been destroyed by careerist middle managers who had
no right to do so. I feel like Google is symbolic, because it _was_ such a
great company for so long. How on earth did a company go from being a cultural
leader (in workplace progressivism) to using Jack Welch-style rank-and-yank in
a couple of years?

Journalistic neutrality, on this sort of issue, either veers toward
meaningless abstraction ("one model is...") or conservative fact-based
concretion. I want to present the facts, but I also want to present,
accurately, the more intangible (but no less real) ether of injustice between
them.

~~~
Cariapa
Please continue using words like "sociopath", "snot-nosed" etc.

I've watched ethics deteriorate over the years in the Valley. I support the
one person who can see through this ongoing shit-baggery.

~~~
michaelochurch
What do you think caused the decline and when do you think it happened?

Most of my direct experiences are in New York. I've never spent more than a
week at one time in the Valley.

I don't think I'm the only person to spot the problem. Most people are afraid
it will hurt their careers to speak up about it. I'm not as worried, because I
know that I'm talented (i'm not worried about blackballing myself) and someone
has to do the "dirty" work of blowing the whistle.

My first whistle-blowing experience was at Google, which was odd because
people (a) acknowledged that some of this shit had been going on for a long
time, but (b) really didn't want to hear it. They wanted to ignore it and
still believe in their Googley workplace utopia. I literally have thousands of
people (from G.) who've never met me but think I'm a loose cannon because I
blew a whistle on someone else they never met. The thing is, though: it's a
whistle, not a gun, that I'm waving. If you don't do scummy shit, you don't
need to worry.

~~~
Cariapa
I had a longer response, but I think the short response is that this is just
the way the corporate world is.

Things were also different when Silicon Valley companies were smaller and
unknown...people seemed to join tech because they liked it, not because it was
cool or they wanted to be like Steve Jobs or Zuckerberg or whatever.

