
Ask forgiveness, not permission - swohns
http://venturehacks.com/articles/ask-forgiveness-not-permission?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+venturehacks+%28Venture+Hacks%29
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blhack
Sheesh, guys. If you take every single piece of advice you read on a blog as a
black-and-white gospel that you should never, ever disobey, then I fear for
your ability to create.

Ask for forgiveness is to prevent you getting stuck into analysis-paralysis
(as much as it grosses me out using business-speak like that, the term fits).

The top comment here as of now, about exposing a firm to $5b worth of risk?

C'mon... Do really think _anybody_ is _actually_ advocating that?

~~~
onlyup
A lot of the time, using absolutes is pointless and irritating.

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ChuckMcM
This is one of those things which sounds great, implies 'get it done' kind of
people, and can have profoundly bad outcomes. Engineer testing auto-image-
upload from a friends phone. Bad idea. Creating a release system where
everything you copy into a magic directory, goes to the web, bad idea. Both
sought forgiveness, both got fired. California being a 'right to work' state
and all.

Asking permission might not be the right answer but checking your ideas out
definitely beats just going for it.

~~~
guylhem
There is not enough context to judge each action (ie such moves could be bad
in specific markets with lot of red tape)

However, by default I'd say there are great ideas, and if they got the boot
for asking forgiveness, maybe it's a good thing for your friends - as it it's
better to be working where one's value is recognized, than at a company
digging its own grave in the midst of a lack of feature, lack of ambition and
lack of insight.

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freework
Every single company under the sun says that they follow this practice. But
the reality is that very few companies actually follow through. Even startups
who swear up and down they give their engineers complete control over what
they build.

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inigoesdr
>But the reality is that very few companies actually follow through. Because
asking your customers to pay you for a product/service when you also expect
them to be your testers is going to lose you a lot of customers long-term in
most markets. If something doesn't work consistently, or they are constantly
finding new issues they will simply find another company to work with. Not to
mention, by letting people push whatever they want to production and waiting
for a customer to report issues you are counting on people to actually submit
bug reports & not just ignore/abandon the issue.

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obviouslygreen
Developers _shouldn't_ have this kind of control unless your product is _for
developers._ I say this _as_ a developer.

The article mentions it only works if you hire insanely smart people, but
that's also not a sufficient condition. You can have really amazing
programmers, but if they don't have a strong understanding of your demographic
and your goals, they're not "smart" in the way that's most relevant to this
particular sort of decision.

I also dislike the phrase to begin with. Asking forgiveness rather than
permission is often more effective, but that doesn't mean it isn't also
irresponsible and a breach of trust. In an environment that _doesn't_ claim
this sort of non-regulation (i.e. most of them), if your integrity sells for
the value of one commit and the risk of breaking or misdirecting your
employer's project, you have more fundamental problems than potential bugs in
production.

~~~
zgohr
_If you have the freedom to make decisions, you also have the responsibility
of being correct._

I'm not sure of the full intentions of the article nor your comment, but I
think you may have missed a major point here. The article does not seem to
argue that insanely smart people know all the right answers; instead it argues
that insanely smart people have a pretty good idea when something is a bad
idea, and will be the type of person who works out the right answer prior to
pushing it live. That said, the other cases is covered as well...

 _Actually, mistakes are fine. They’re something you trade off for other
variables like speed of iteration._

~~~
obviouslygreen
One problem I have with your second quote is that "speed of iteration," like
intelligence of employees, is not in and of itself enough to make the result
good for the product. The latter requires that the employees understand the
target audience and their needs. The former requires that your iterations are
moving in a direction that satisfies your target demographic, and if it
doesn't, this isn't just not beneficial: Your speed of iteration becomes
directly detrimental to the product.

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rza
_This policy only works if you hire insanely smart and capable people, and let
go of the ones who are not._

Yet another pretentious startup blogger. I am insanely smart and capable, yet
for anything beyond a cute web app, I don't think you should use users as a
debugging tool

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pfortuny
Right, the problem is most people who claim to do so NEVER ask for
forgiveness...

OTOH I don't accept he sentence but that is a different question.

~~~
skore
Indeed. Most of the time, it seems to me like it appeals to the people who
read it as "Ask grudging resignation, not permission".

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kaoD
The article mentions it (briefly) but it's probably worth noting: Valve's a
living example of success using this model. These guys went from zero to
I-own-the-software-industry (both in development and distribution) in a
breeze!

Employees get to pick their own projects: their work model is based around
self-gathered work groups. Got an awesome idea? Go make a group, gather fellow
employees and DO IT! The company is so centered around this fact that
employee's desks have wheels so they're easier to move around.

Okay, this is just anecdotal evidence and they might just be the luckiest
company ever, but they managed to pull the trick and it would be dumb to
overlook their success.

Here's a cool handbook for new Valve employees if you want to take a deeper
look at how Valve works:

[http://www.valvesoftware.com/company/Valve_Handbook_LowRes.p...](http://www.valvesoftware.com/company/Valve_Handbook_LowRes.pdf)

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joedev
Without controls in place, let's see how much "forgiveness" you receive from
the SEC and Sarbox enforcers when things go awry and shareholders lose out.

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piocan
Venture Hacks blog is back? Oh... I hope so!

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swohns
Would love HN wisdom! We're using Twitter to build an NLP app, and everyday
we're wondering if they will just pull the plug on us. We have a friend at
Twitter in Ops: ask permission or forgiveness?

~~~
vm
The underlying question of your comment is whether this is a stable business
model. You already indicate that Twitter has the _ability_ to disrupt/shutdown
your service, which puts you in a difficult situation to build something of
value. If you are ever wildly successful and dependent on one platform, then
that platform will extract value from you or replace you. Consider this a
rule, not a guideline, because it always makes business sense for the platform
to do that. Recent examples include Zynga paying the Facebook "tax,"
Craigslist effectively shutting down PadMapper, and the slew of Twitter 3rd
party apps that have been crippled by limited/revoked access.

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orangethirty
Re: Don't fuck around.

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OGinparadise
_Ask forgiveness, not permission_

Dear Board of Directors, During the past few weeks I have been engaging in
unauthorized trading. I bet that the Euro would weaken drastically, hoping to
make the company at least $4.6 Billion. Instead, we're 5 billion down, as the
situation changed.

I was going to ask for permission to use all that cash to trade, but I read on
a blog that I should ask for forgiveness, after the fact. So, forgive me.

~~~
BerislavLopac
The policy is not about _always getting forgiveness_ , it's about asking for
it when you can realistically expect it to be granted. A company employing
that policy should also be very clear about what acts you'll never get
forgiveness for, and that would of course include breaking the law like in the
parent's (obviously exaggerated) example.

~~~
OGinparadise
BS, they are essentially asking people to take the risk, if it works _they_
benefit a great, if it backfires, they'll issue a press release disavowing
you.

Remember, a hacker is not Google or Apple to get away with book scanning ("ask
us nicely to remove scans of _your_ books") or location tracking.

