
Brittleness comes from “One Thing” - gmays
https://blog.asmartbear.com/brittleness.html
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maneesh
Brittle sounds like fragile. This article reminds me of Nassim Taleb's amazing
book, Antifragile.

Fragile organizations and systems break from randomness. Robust ones are able
to resist and stay strong. But Antifragile ones actually _benefit_ from
randomness and volatility.

I highly recommend the book -- it's highly relevant to startup companies who,
rather than shooting for the moon, should protect their downside (at first)
and place small bets on numerous 10x activities.

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lilbobbytables
I'm not sure I fully understand that last sentence, could you explain?

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cheez
Not OP but I'd guess this means "don't do anything where one bad move takes
you out of the game, and invest a little in a lot of long shots"

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jeffdavis
"Brittle" does not necessarily mean "bad". If that one marketing channel is
really all you have, and perhaps the entire reason your company exists; then
it might be fineto just admit that, make the most of it without overextending
yourself or making lots of commitments, and then prepare for starting the next
business.

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Chiba-City
Some permutation of "pair programming" helps with "mission critical" software
execution risks. We call this "the bus test" in DC no-nonsense engineering.
Project execution must survive anyone getting "hit by a bus."

It does not have to be pair-teams. It can be 3-teams that review each other's
code. Crafting shared libraries also helps focus multiple developers around
code, docs, calling semantics and help surface implicit performance
expectations or penalties early.

I have been the hero developer cranking 10K lines of C per month. But divide
and conquer where software development MATTERS isn't very wise. Methods make
sense when dozens of jobs, thousands of lives or millions of dollars are at
stake every week and month of a project.

We used to call virtuous redundancy "belt and suspenders."

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davidw
In a certain sense, having a 9 to 5 is an even more extreme version of 'one
thing' in that you have one big client that accounts for 100% of your revenue.
Of course, there are also efficiencies in having one 'client' that are
beneficial to both employee and employer.

Edit: see 'Theory of the Firm'.

~~~
annabellish
On the small scales (i.e., you or me) it can make sense to have your second
thing be a large pot of savings, which is a relatively inexpensive way of
providing limited redundancy.

In the same way that a data center has full redundancy for failure of an
individual machine, but limited redundancy for failure of the city's power
grid, all we _really_ need is enough redundancy to give us time to solve the
problem.

Large organisations move too slowly for this to be an option, so they need the
much more expensive full redundancy.

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snakeboy
Reminds me of this infographic showing the revenue streams for five of the
largest tech companies: [http://www.visualcapitalist.com/chart-5-tech-giants-
make-bil...](http://www.visualcapitalist.com/chart-5-tech-giants-make-
billions/)

It still boggles my mind that Facebook makes 97% of its revenue from Facebook
Ads.

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noway421
That's their actual product after all

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jannotti
Did this blog post just try to coin the phrase "one thing" in place of the
clearer and well-known "single point of failure"?

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emmelaich
SPOF is too jargony for business people. And it's rarely _single_ ; just too
few.

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jessaustin
_...too jargony for business people._

Is that a thing that actually exists?

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Hextinium
This can be generalized to thinking about what happens when X goes away in
your organization or team. If Bill doesn't come in tomorrow what will happen?
Planning for those cases and covering your bases for a a more effective
organization is what makes them last instead of falling apart at the first rip
off the seam.

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rdlecler1
The author has come up with the theory of diversification. The problem here is
that, finding one thing is already hard. You often can’t magically find
another thing that’s equally effective and so you burn a lot of money and
energy pursuing other strategies. Take a look at what Charlie Munger says
about diversification. Forget it, make big huge bets when there is a large
positive assymetric risk reward.

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joshmarlow
It seems like edit distance is an equivalent way to think of this. Your
company is brittle if it is one edit/mutation away from failure.

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lgas
That's an interesting analogy but the big difference is that with traditional
edit distance every edit is exactly the same -- one character changed to
another character. In the business case there's no equivalent "unit" size for
changes.

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joshmarlow
Very true. Edit distance is well formalized, wheres defining a mutation on a
business operation is not (though it would be super interesting to think
about). So yeah, totally a fuzzy analogy.

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brucephillips
What does "brittle" mean that "risky" doesn't? I don't think we need a new
word here.

Also, the listed risks are cherry picked to fit the "one thing" pattern. Risks
that don't fit that pattern include competition risk, technology risk, and
financing risk.

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rpdillon
I think of brittleness as a subset of risk. Risk has a very large surface
area, and has to be mitigated by a correspondingly large number of techniques.
Brittleness seems like a useful subset to address in the context of specific
techniques that can avoid it. 'One thing' seems like a useful heuristic in
this context.

~~~
brucephillips
That's a good point, except we already have a term for that as well. It's a
single point of failure.

