
How Software Companies Die (1995) - pappyo
http://www.zoion.com/~erlkonig/writings/programmer-beekeeping.html
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gdg92989
Other previous discussion. This one is 120 days ago
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4776844>

Personally I don't see why this resonates so much with the HN community. Its a
great example of the worst attitude to take to work every day.

~~~
ChuckMcM
_Personally I don't see why this resonates so much with the HN community._

Really? This is like a nerd mantra, it hits so many stereotypes in so few
words. Orson talked about it at BayCon once when it came up.

I don't have a clear memory of exactly what he said but I took away from it
that smart, introverted, people have a terrible time seeing anything outside
their pool of influence, like looking at your shoes in a crowd and saying
"everyone is crowding around me because I'm the coolest" when if you looked up
you would see a pack of wolves circling the crowd. So all of their evaluation
in their environment is about them and how people around them are responding.

An artifact of that inward looking view is to construct an internally
consistent explanation for why things suck now but didn't before. That always
targets people who are not like them (the introvert) and for whom the
introvert cannot understand their motivations or values. (and more often than
not in a software company that is "suits", aka business people or managers)

You combine that with a changing market place, and the thing that made the
software successful before isn't valid any more, but if the programmers don't
know why the software was successful in the first place they can't understand
what changed or how to fix it. Imagine an artist who paints with charcoal,
gets discovered, people buy their works, and then fashion moves on, and the
artist goes broke. To an external viewer, fashion simply moved on, the artist
was there (and fashionable for a time) and then they weren't. But _internally_
the artist may have no concept of how briefly they were fashionable and now
they weren't. Instead they construct an externalization of "discovery" where
suddenly people begin to understand what it is they are doing with their art,
and when they move on it is always some external force which has corrupted the
minds of people seeing it or modified their vision. To accept the alternative,
that their success was luck and fashion, rather than some deeper meaning, may
be too harsh to think.

People cling to sense of destiny and purpose rather than consider themselves
the random connection of ova and zygote and circumstance. Where is the
_meaning_ in that?

Orson captured this tension wonderfully in his essay, it resonates both with
the bees who desperately want to be special and with the bee keepers who want
productive bees without understanding that the bee's production is a byproduct
of flowers and normal bee activity, it's a side effect of where the hive is
and where the flowers are. Many software companies are fashion objects,
successful ones are constantly producing new concepts and new ideas to stay in
the limelight. Unsuccessful ones take a single success and assume they are
done, nothing left to do but iterate. But fashion doesn't work like that.

~~~
datapolitical
Fashion is never finished.

------
yuhong
[http://programmers.stackexchange.com/questions/45776/why-
do-...](http://programmers.stackexchange.com/questions/45776/why-do-business-
analysts-and-project-managers-get-higher-salaries-than-programme)

~~~
pasbesoin
> closed as not constructive by Mark Trapp Sep 26 '11 at 8:16

I previously commented here on this in a slightly snarky fashion. I deleted
that, but almost simultaneously, an upvote came through. (Sorry about that,
whomever...)

So, I'm recommenting, but hopefully without the snark. For me, this aspect of
"Programming" was a serious, career-level question at times. This comment is
now OT with respect to the OP, I guess, but... then again, maybe it's not.
Because... isn't this a serious, career level question for many programmers?

And, if so, where else would one discuss such things?

In some ways, the out and out coding can be easier. It's the "career", and the
politics, that can be the biggest pain in the ass with regard to the job.
Depending upon circumstances. (Healthy hive, or smoked, as it were.)

------
sid6376
Previous discussion on HN <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=552821>

~~~
hakaaaaak
1435 days ago- that's almost 4 years. I wonder if one day in 2034 someone will
post a "done that" link with a conversation over 10k days old?

~~~
naanalla
The classics remain classic. Still wonder same about "The Mythical Man-Month"
So true...

------
thsiao
came from a big company, escaped to start-up world but also a marketer. take
offense that marketers are the problem here. coders aren't the only ones who
get the life blood sucked out of them by too much management. good marketers
love to work with good coders and relish in creativity and risk-taking.

------
chrchr
It's as true today as it was in his time.

------
michaelochurch
This is a good start, but ultimately doesn't have much insight into _why_
companies die. Venkat Rao opened this discussion with his Gervais Principle
series, which is very good: [http://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/07/the-gervais-
principle-o...](http://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/07/the-gervais-principle-or-
the-office-according-to-the-office/)

I continued it with my (ongoing) series on my blog (8 parts and counting, will
take a while to read):
[http://michaelochurch.wordpress.com/2013/02/19/gervais-
princ...](http://michaelochurch.wordpress.com/2013/02/19/gervais-principle-
questioned-macleods-hierarchy-the-technocrat-and-vc-startups/)

Companies start out as a risk transfer. Those who can tolerate financial
volatility and change and social upheaval (MacLeod Sociopaths) start to trade
risk with those who don't want it (MacLeod Losers). The risk-seekers become
the entrepreneurs; the risk-averse become workers. This is benign for a while,
but as the company becomes stable, the upper class becomes entitled,
established, and complacent. They want to keep the perceived risk trade going,
but the business is actually de-risked, so now they're just grabbing for
unjustified or legacy superiority. They've won, and now they want to _stay_
where they are. In order to keep the risk-transfer between them and the
(expectancy-sacrificing) Losers, they have to create a middling buffer class
of Clueless. This style of organization becomes resistant to change,
systemically underperforming, and bland, but it's _extremely_ stable on its
own terms. People don't want the jobs above them enough to break the rules.
Losers (who value comfort and stability) see the ranks above them as being
harder, riskier, and are happy to stay put. Clueless are oblivious to the
Effort Thermocline (the point in an organization where jobs become _easier_
\-- but also more political-- with ascending rank instead of harder) and run
the organizational day-to-day while oblivious to the agendas of the Sociopaths
above them.

The most common end state of this is the organization with the full MacLeod
hierarchy: Losers at the bottom, Clueless in the middle, Sociopaths at the
top. It's a mature rank culture where position and subordinacy matter more
than creative excellence and technical improvement. But why?

The process is complex, but the truth is that this form of organizational
corruption was, for a long time, _harmless_ from a business perspective. When
you're providing commodity products or services, the MacLeod rank culture
works. It does the job.

What's changing (first in software, increasingly in other areas of business)
is the convexity switch. Concave work is work on which the difference between
excellence and mediocrity is insignificant compared to that between mediocrity
and zero. It's "get-it-done" commodity work where creativity isn't necessary
or even useful. Convex work is that in which the difference between excellence
and mediocrity is huge, and mediocrity is close to (or might be) zero.

The difference between the (winding down) industrial and (soon to come)
technological eras is the convexity of the work that the world needs. In the
industrial era, most needed work was concave and the hierarchical MacLeod
organization worked well. In the technological era in which the commodity work
has been given to machines (who do it far more reliably and cheaply than any
human) what's left is _convex_ work. Traditional industrial management, though
successful for 200 years, just falls down. The reason why is that it's all
about reducing variance. For concave work, variation is mostly to the
downside, and variance-reduction (the goal of most management) improves
expectancy. For concave work, variance is mostly to the upside, and variance-
reducing management drives expectancy to zero.

