
What Grace Hopper meant with “easier to ask forgiveness than to get permission” - fagnerbrack
https://changelog.com/posts/what-admiral-grace-hopper-really-meant
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thesuperbigfrog
"She was a military officer in a large organization. If you’ve ever worked at
a company or an organization that operates at that kind of global scale… it’s
very hard to get permission to do anything, because you need to go up three or
four levels in the hierarchy above your boss to get permission"

Can confirm. I have worked in the military and large corporations with
draconian policies.

Any organization of that size tends to be bereaucratic in order to handle
people at scale and therefore is resistant to change and out-of-the-box
thinking even when it would greatly benefit the organization. Individuals and
first-line managers are rarely empowered to make changes without several
levels of approval.

Only _after_ a new idea or process has been proven to be more effective will
it be acknowledged as an option that the organization should consider for
wider use throughout the organization. This is essentially part of the reason
why larger organizations have more difficulty being innovative compared to
smaller, more nimble organizations.

~~~
punnerud
This is why I love to be a consultant in a large corporation, because I can
talk with a lot of people without the feeling that I have to obey the
hierarchy. When I figure out the best common goal I can follow the hierarchy
to get approval.

Maybe this only works in Norway..?

~~~
cotillion
As a consultant I found that you don't even have to follow the hierarchy. You
know you won't be at a company forever so just ignore those who are likely to
obstruct and skip the hierarchy. And once you have backing from higher up
there is little lower levels can do to obstruct your invoices.

But my experience is from Sweden so maybe it only works in Scandinavia.

~~~
eecc
Oh, I got kicked out big time a couple times for that... I guess I was hired
to sweat at the keyboard, not to think.

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doc_gunthrop
> First of all, many people don’t know that Admiral Grace Hopper said that;
> the attribution.

Hopper popularized the term, but did not coin it.

> Grace Hopper did employ and help to popularize the expression by 1982, but
> it was already in circulation.[1]

[1]:
[https://quoteinvestigator.com/2018/06/19/forgive/](https://quoteinvestigator.com/2018/06/19/forgive/)

~~~
jki275
The expression has been a military phrase from time immemorial. It wouldn't
surprise me to hear that Roman Centurions used it.

~~~
fortran77
You should take a look at Quote Investigator. Many phrases have definite
"start" times that are well documented.

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bitwize
I hear this a lot at my company as "take risks" with tales from people at
director level or above about how they embarked on bold new marketing
initiatives their bosses disapproved of that increased company visibility and
thus, profits. But I'm just a programmer schlub. People like me don't get
"asked to leave", we get fired. Plus, the activities of people like me are
more closely tracked, and we are going to be noticed and corrected much
earlier for going off script. We have less to gain, and more to lose, from
taking risks than those with actual authority. The lower down the org chart
you go, the more you benefit by keeping your head down, focusing on meeting or
exceeding your KPIs, and not rocking the boat too much.

~~~
scarface74
Organizational Theory 101 is that there are three levers of power in an
organization - relationship, expert, and role in that order.

Getting anything done in an organization means building the right
relationships first. Building the right relationships is the difference
between being able to ask the infrastructure guys to create some VMs for you
in Slack, they do it immediately and then ask you to fill out a ticket and
having to fill out the ticket and wait for two weeks.

The second part of that is “pre-wiring” - convincing one of two people of your
idea, taking their objections into account and improving on your idea until
you can make a convincing argument to your manager. It’s a lot easier to be in
a technical meeting where you already have your coworkers buy in than one
where you are fighting on multiple fronts.

Once you have the relationships, you have to convince people that you know
what you’re doing by having a few successful projects under your belt. It’s a
lot easier to convince people once you have a track record of success.

Role power in my experience is the least effective - especially in the
software industry. If you don’t have the other two, it’s way too easy for
people who report to you to jump ship.

Honestly, in today’s market for software developers. If you live in any major
metropolitan area in the US (I’m in Atlanta) and you keep yourself marketable
jobs are a dime a dozen. The last thing I worry about is long term
unemployment - this has been true for the last two decades.

~~~
hnick
> Getting anything done in an organization means building the right
> relationships first. Building the right relationships is the difference
> between being able to ask the infrastructure guys to create some VMs for you
> in Slack, they do it immediately and then ask you to fill out a ticket and
> having to fill out the ticket and wait for two weeks.

Funny, they keep rolling out more 'advanced' helpdesk software where I work to
avoid building social connections. In the old days I got to know people, now
there's no chance of that. There isn't even a name on the emails.

I think in the long run this really hurts the company. It also makes it much
easier to be upset at the 'stupid help desk people' rather than individuals
you know might just be having a bad day.

~~~
scarface74
I actually left my last company partially for that reason. I was the dev lead,
responsible for getting a green field project out and the company I was
working for merged with another company and they instituted so many processes
around the IT processes I couldn’t get anything done. We also migrated to AWS
and they treated AWS like an expensive colo. Every thing had to be approved,
we could only get VMs and no access to any other functionality and I couldn’t
even get a separate dev account, isolated from production so we could
experiment and work.

As soon as I got phase 1 completed of the project, I found another job as
“just” a senior software engineer and the day I came in, immediately got full
access to everything and admin credentials to our AWS accounts.

Before the IT gatekeepers respond about how crazy it is to give software
engineers unfettered access to the production infrastructure, I was brought in
partially for my AWS architectural experience (adult supervision), I
negotiated _not_ to be a team lead and I switch back and forth between
development and cloud infrastructure depending on the day of the week.

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protomyth
I remember a phrase that goes with this but cannot remember the origin:
"actions taken without orders are not actions taken against orders".

~~~
scarface74
That’s a great statement. Actions taken without orders will usually end up
with at most a slap on the wrist “for not following the process” or a wink and
“that was a great idea but can you try not to step on toes?”. Actions against
orders is insubordination.

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jl2718
Regarding ethics referenced, it seems “ask forgiveness” has been the legal
strategy of the biggest startups of the last 10 years. These were not so much
innovation as much as exploitation of an obvious market that was restricted to
preserve a public good (residential neighborhoods and streets). I suppose that
the ethical way to get around such laws may be open marketplace platforms,
such that the profits can only come from choice of technology, and not market
control over scarce resources.

~~~
scarface74
What was the ethical reason for the taxi medallion system? All it did was
create an artificial shortage and a few people got rich buying medallions and
the actual taxi drivers were just as shortchanged by the owners of the
medallion as they are by Uber and it was a worse customer experience.

~~~
icebraining
The ethical reason was to reduce congestion. Whether that's the _real_
intention and, if it was, whether it was accomplishing that goal is arguable,
of course.

~~~
lotsofpulp
Increasing the price of using a vehicle in the congested region would have
been the ethical way to reduce congestion, not making a market controlled by
government officials that they could collect rent on.

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pacaro
It's a useful maxim in an organizational or bureaucratic setting for sure, but
is not generaly good advice in personal relationships

~~~
doc_gunthrop
I've heard this quote used in a joke form. Something like "I prayed to God for
a bike but never got one. So I stole one and asked for forgiveness instead."

~~~
Digit-Al
I believe this would fall under the maxim "God only helps those who help
themselves" :-/

~~~
jdnenej
How convenient

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jcampbell1
> I don’t wanna pick on any particular company, but I think we could rattle
> off a list of companies whose primary business model is to take public goods
> and to turn them into private profits

There must be some echo chamber that I am not familiar with. What is an
example of this? Are people buying the Brooklyn bridge again?

~~~
CodeWriter23
Selling water rights to bottled water companies is one example. I can’t drill
a well in my back yard because of some transaction that entitled the local
water bottling and delivery company to the water.

~~~
doc_gunthrop
This sounds similar to when Monsanto tried to patent seeds and sued small
farmers out of their livelihood.

~~~
nicoburns
You say this as if it's something that happened in the past. They're still
doing this. Worse, in some countries they've tried to get all other seeds
banned.

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fortran77
I admire Grace Hopper, but she did not coin this phrase.

[https://quoteinvestigator.com/2018/06/19/forgive/](https://quoteinvestigator.com/2018/06/19/forgive/)

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chooseaname
"If you're going to go down, take people with you."

It means if you're going to do something risky, partner with someone at a
higher level than you. If your idea is solid enough, they won't be too hard to
find.

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strictfp
Optimistic locking makes better progress than pessimistic locking in a non-
heavily-contended case ;P

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emmelaich
Similarly, people misapply Postel's maxim.

You have to read it with a knowledge of the context and history.

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jgalt212
This should be the Cuba Gooding, Jr defense.

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dnautics
> Move the extrinsic cost to the public domain so that we can profit.

> ...whose primary business model is to take public goods and to turn them
> into private profits

First, those two statements are not at all the same.

Second, what constitutes "extrinsic cost" is subjective. If you go out and
feed the homeless for a day, there is an extrinsic cost (to someone,
somewhere) of the net sum of your activities. Judging whether or not the
extrinsic cost is outweighed by the extrinsic is... Dangerous.

Third, ALL corporations, (private corporations, nonprofits and governments),
and all humans (miners, manufacturers, writers, artists) take public goods and
turn them into private goods, of course, not all of them profit, either by
design or by execution. Taking public goods and turning them into private
goods is what it means to transact in society.

