
Why “Move Fast and Break Things” Doesn’t Work Anymore - poliX
https://hbr.org/2019/12/why-move-fast-and-break-things-doesnt-work-anymore
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throwGuardian
Please, someone tell the geniuses at Harvard business that no one ever used
"Move Fast, break things" for chips. Having been in the industry long enough,
I've seen plenty a launch date moved, and chip-respins executed in favor of
risking a recall of hardware from the field.

It's only non-critical, consumer/casual software/applications that can afford
to move fast, and break things. Your bank, or medical records, or even traffic
light controls simply cannot move fast and break

~~~
Frost1x
>Your bank, or medical records, or even traffic light controls simply cannot
move fast and break

Don't tell the banks and financial industry that (looking at you, Equifax).

~~~
ben509
At least in finance it's more "move slowly and hope no one notices it's
broken."

~~~
Psyladine
Don't edit that, that's a load bearing spreadsheet!

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narnianal
Sadly the author doesn't understand what iterating quickly means. It's not a
means of achieving greater performance in a known area, but a means of finding
something that works in an unknown space.

So the completely opposite argumentation would've worked. For the last 10+
years we spent iterating over several startups to find how to use this new
technology of mobile and internet, and now that we have found most reasonable
usecases we can slow down and optimize them.

On the other hand there are always areas we don't know much about, like in the
areas of shared knowledge, in the niches. There of course quick iteration
continues to be the way to go.

~~~
jevgeni
Nowhere in the article has the author claimed that. :/

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mkl
From the article: "Shift 2: From Rapid Iteration to Exploration"

But rapid iteration is the most efficient means of exploration for many areas.
Exploration is the _reason_ many people use the "move fast and break things"
rapid iteration strategy.

~~~
jevgeni
Yes, exactly my point. Thank you.

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softwaredoug
Move fast/break things works great when the risks associated with the
“breaking” are minuscule, experiments can be measured and isolated, and the
upside for experimentation high (UI tweaks, recsys or search algo
improvements, social media, etc).

Move slow, keep things working works well when breaking things has a huge
downside and safe experimentation on live customers near impossible. Such as
medicine, legal compliance, building airplanes, utilities.

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kerpele
I think the big issue with companies like Facebook is not that their
development model moves too quickly for them to be able to react to their
issues but that they simply don’t care. Facebook has known about the issues
with privacy, hyper targeted advertising etc for years. You don’t need to move
very fast to react to a fundamental issue in that timeframe.

~~~
ori_b
You call it an issue. We call it a revenue stream.

~~~
asveikau
And here's another point where we may disagree: money is not a thing to be
worshiped at the cost of everything else.

~~~
ori_b
You may disagree, but where are you getting the resources to push your
position?

~~~
asveikau
I think my position is already a majority one. Go out in the street and ask
people if money is the most important thing in life.

~~~
ori_b
Now, go find one of those people that isn't a willing revenue stream for
surveillance capitalism.

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jknoepfler
"Move fast, break things" never worked in any meaningful way, especially in
AWS. It's a garbage philosophy repeated by idiots who don't support business
applications driven by software on a global (enterprise, mission critical,
always-on) scale. Literally no one at Amazon practices this idea, except the
idiots who think that launching pre-alpha garbage into production because of
poorly conceived re:invent promises is an acceptable business model that
builds customer trust (spoilers, it doesn't). Source: worked there, did that.

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ChrisMarshallNY
I don't think it ever worked that well, but I have also always followed a
different muse than the current zeitgeist.

I think that SpaceX is living proof that you can move very fast indeed,
without breaking things.

As we well know, they do, very rarely, break things (with great video), but
when that happens; it only happens _once_.

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jacquesm
That's about as nice an example of survivorship bias as you could find. SpaceX
came within a whisker of ceasing to exist. If that _one_ launch had failed it
would have been game over for them. But they got lucky that time and they have
done a fantastic job at keeping their eye on the ball ever since. Every
business has one or more of those critical moments in time when things just
have to go your way. If you are in a business where breaking things is your
only option to succeed at all then you should. SpaceX gambled and won, and
breaking things is still the way of the world in rocketry and likely will be
for some time.

~~~
ChrisMarshallNY
Point taken, but they also don't keep breaking the same things, over and over;
simply because it is not cost-effective to avoid the breakage.

Makes business sense, but I've always been one of these knuckleheads that
wants to write great code; simply because I like to do it.

I got into the habit of practicing zero-tolerance on quality. I've never found
_any_ level of breakage acceptable in my own work. I literally get physically
uncomfortable when I know there's a bug in my code, and I have been known to
get out of bed at 2AM, and go downstairs to fix it.

I know that I'm fortunate to be in a place where I am free to do that. I don't
need to run in the rat race.

~~~
jacquesm
When SpaceX breaks stuff it is simply because not all the variables are known,
not because they cut corners and harm their customers in favor of their bottom
line or speed of execution.

~~~
ChrisMarshallNY
Exactly. It may be "survivorship bias," but sometimes, we survive because we
did it right, and it's not a bad idea to see what the survivors did. They
didn't screw up the launch, because they screwed up the tests; where it was
expected.

Remember when the ability to land a spent booster was being poo-poohed by the
"old guard"? Remember those really awesome booms?

Nowadays, landing the boosters has become so routine that it isn't even
mentioned anymore.

That's cool.

I am kind of in awe of the way they work. I'm not sure that I'd be up for
working in that environment, myself, but I have mad respect for them.

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ElFitz
> _With every new generation of chips came new possibilities and new
> applications. The firms that developed those applications the fastest won._

Initially, I was really disappointed in this article. Facebook, on the client-
side, was _' possible'_ on a Pentium 4. Perhaps a III.

Internet speeds where sufficient in the early 2000's, and MySpace was created
a year before Facebook. We all know who won.

I really had a hard time seeing what "chip generations" or "being first" had
to do with any of it.

Sure, powerful enough hardware is a pre-requisite. But... I couldn't see any
correlation between generations of products / services and CPU power.

In my mind, if there was a correlation to be had, it'd rather have been
between said generations of products / services and, first internet speed, and
then internet adoption.

And Moore's law didn't have much to do with it.

Then, it hit me. I was on the wrong time scale. He's talking decades. We're
not looking at the 20 or even 30 years, but at the last 60 or 70 years.

So, yes, he still misses the entire "internet tipping point", with the
associated paradigm shift, that is probably just as important as his precious
Moore's law.

But he's also right on how it enabled the Mainframe -> PC -> Smartphone
transitions.

Although I still don't believe in the theory that being first matters that
much.

Who here remembers Microsoft's UMPCs? Or Intel's MIDs? Or the first third-
party iPhone app?

... he does make _a_ point. But I don't know what to make of the whole thing,
really.

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tomasGiden
Whenever I see articles like this or about frameworks like the Cynefin
framework I cannot help but to see it like any mathematical optimization
problem. If the solution is simple to see you just jump to the solution. If it
is more complicated but you have good practices / know the gradient (“know in
what direction you are going”) and the problem is well behaved, you can
iterate quickly and reach and expect to find an optimum. But if it is more
complex and you don’t know I what direction to go / don’t have a gradient you
need to do try lots of different experiments in parallel also.

And the more costly an iteration is the more important it is with multiple
perspectives to get as much data into the different experiments from the
beginning as opposed to randomly selecting things to try out and seeing what
happens.

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KineticLensman
TFA has lots of 'ideal world' assumptions that are a real hostage to fortune,
e.g.

> This new era, on the other hand, will be one of mass collaboration in which
> government partners with academia and industry to explore new technologies
> in the pre-competitive phase

. ...

> That’s why we can expect the basis of competition to shift away from design
> sprints, iterating, and pivoting to building meaningful relationships in
> order to solve grand challenges. Power in this new era will not sit at the
> top of industrial hierarchies, but will emanate from the center of networks
> and ecosystems

Not sure if the FAANG-likes will see it like that.

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taneq
4\. Regulators and the public have both grown increasingly alert for 'fake it
til you make it' gambits. Regulators are more likely to intervene when
companies create a public hazard (eg. Theranos, Uber's self driving program)
or skirt legality with their business models (Uber, again, hmm.) The public is
more likely to cynically exploit loss-leader behaviour and then jump ship once
the company tries to turn a profit.

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stiray
My answer would be: as the things are so broken, that I sometimes wonder how
anything still works. Flawed cpus, memory, motherboards, operating systems,
hardware, not to even go into userspace/web software full of lasigna
frameworks that are buggy as hell even on then own and once you put all that
into gulash called modern software... Its a small miracle on its own.

~~~
xrisk
the saving grace is probably the fact that our hardware is pretty well
designed and so are the core components of our operating systems

~~~
matwood
Not just well designed, but many core components have been iterated on for
decades at this point.

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acd
Hopefully this ends open Office spaces trend. I hope that there be a
resurgence of private offices again. Cross discipline cross company
cooperation sounds interesting.

I also tends to think that the move fast and break things builds technical
debt. As such as there is a need for a cross between agile and a more planned
approach.

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docuru
In my opinion, there are many companies that “move fast and break things”. It
happens on the early days.

Once they grow big, they can’t afford to move quick. And breaking things seems
dangerous.

So it does works. But depending on the stage the company at

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exabrial
It only has ever worked if you have a monopoly or plenty of cash to burn. If
you can test in production and your user base can absorb errors/inconsistent
behavior, it's the path to finding new verticals.

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whoisthemachine
I always took this to mean break your unit tests and fix them before anyone
else notices, but that just may be the software developer in me.

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AzzieElbab
I always used "move fast and break things" as an excuse to dump legacy soft

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K0SM0S
I move that the article definitely touches upon a critical topic but fails to
nail it due to a too-narrow yet too-peripheral account.

Consider this:

> Over the coming decades, however, agility will take on a new meaning: the
> ability to explore multiple domains at once and combine them into something
> that produces value. We’ll need computer scientists working with cancer
> scientists, for example, to identify specific genetic markers that could
> lead to a cure. To do this, we’ll need to learn how to go slower to have a
> greater impact.

This "working with, across domains" mantra underlies the entire article. It's
called transdisciplinarity — if not of individuals, of teams.

Guess what. That's how we've done _any sector_ for the longest of times. You
start with self-made specialists, they grow the field, which then touches
other fields, and before you know it, a "normal" business has several
functions: accounting, sales, legal, marketing, production, etc.

Tech is new, and tech is geeky — the greatest among us estimate that no more
than 1~5% of the population has enough interest to enter and remain in the
field.

Transdisciplinarity is usually a major key to unlock hard problems, indeed. As
more and more engineers enter the tech field coming from previous careers,
armed with domain knowledge, the quality and "relevance" of tech features
improves, no doubt about it — I think music and the arts in general, observed
over the last 50 years or so, is a strong illustration of that.

> These new technologies are far too complex for anyone to develop on their
> own. That’s why we can expect the basis of competition to shift away from
> design sprints, iterating, and pivoting to building meaningful relationships
> in order to solve grand challenges.

This literally confuses goals with methods. Agile never told you what to do or
why you do it, it's just a "small method for small teams to work
better/faster, to manage complexity". Grand challenges don't get automagically
solved because they're big and involve many people from many fields.

The "far too complex for anyone to develop on their own" part is more telling
of a philosophical bias: we tend to either see the world as "too complicated
to be explained" (as the HR author) or "too simple to be worth wasting time to
intellectualize it" (this is the general entrepreunarial mindset, to go at
things from action even if it's not entirely clear mentally; the opposite
mindset, which is mine, is more of a research ethos, an observer / thinker.)

Transdisciplinarity is also not a new thing. It's just the latest trend to
kick in on the road to progress, it's a pendulum from hyper-specialization
(high verticals) to holistic solutions (big horizontals).

Consider philosophy, human beings sprouting ideas, software engineering for
the mind. An idea appears somewhere, in a group, in some space-time. It starts
localized, vertical. The taller is gets (i.e. the highest its worth and the
strongest its implementation, its relevant rooting at many levels of the
stack), the wider it may eventually resonate, spread, horizontally towards
other fields, other domains, other spacetimes and cultures. "Don't kill thy
neighbor" is kind of such a piece of software that most of us have installed.
But look how philosophy generates ideas: usually not in isolation, rather from
looking at the world. The best philosophers, imho, are those who speak from
experience (typically not career-philosophers, rather doers, goers, people who
act and only then speak).

Case in point: after a few thousand years of thinking and transmission,
philosophy is part of everything we do, are.

Technology (in the current modern sense, computing, electronics, etc) is like
that, it's a big vertical with tremendous horizontal reach. It will become,
like philosophy, like any valuable improvement to human condition, a massively
transdisciplinary activity.

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kwhitefoot
Did it ever? And if so for what value of 'work'?

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sethgibbons
Anymore? Did it ever?

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kmbond
It never did

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dmitriid
Did it ever work?

~~~
loopz
It worked for the 5% survivors.

~~~
RodgerTheGreat
If you have a 5% chance of becoming a billionaire and a 95% chance of walking
away from a failed startup with minor debts and lost time, the math says that
your expected value for moving fast and breaking things is still quite high.

Of course, if you step outside yourself and _also_ consider the downsides of
failure for your employees, your investors, your customers, and the harm that
a fast-and-loose approach could do for the public at large, or the
environment, (or other externalities, depending on your business) it starts to
get less attractive.

Being a sociopath who is "only looking out for #1" is a big advantage in
business!

~~~
loopz
There's no 5% chance of becoming billionaire, but of building a business that
_survives_ beyond 2 years, probably with lots of hard work, investment and
learnings from past failures.

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squeezingswirls
Original, and full article at [https://hbr.org/2019/12/why-move-fast-and-
break-things-doesn...](https://hbr.org/2019/12/why-move-fast-and-break-things-
doesnt-work-anymore)

