Yes! well done. Having taken apart some consumer level coffee machines I was shocked at the poor design. Something much better is possible, but requires redesigning the base components that are common off the shelf
Exactly. All those things that are critical in a startup are really good way to accelerate possibly stagnant development. However, short-sightedness and ignoring tech debt kills startups too
Yep yep, exactly this. When an incident review reveals a fluke that flew past all the reasonable safeguards, a case that the team may have acknowledged when implementing those safeguards. Sometimes those safeguards are still adequate, as you can’t mitigate 100% of accidents, and it’s not worth it to try!
I’d go further to say that it’s a trap to try, it’s obvious that you can’t get 100% reliability, but people still feel uneasy with doing nothing
Building the wrong thing is exactly what happens when you listen to management too much. Talk to the client yourself. Learn the subject. Get the textbook. Read the materials. That's how you build the right thing.
> They are required because building the wrong thing is worse than not building anything at all
And yet, "manager" is usually[1] only responsible for ensuring the boards get carried from the truck to the construction site and that two workers don't shoot at each other with nail guns, not "we, collectively, are building the right house."
I freely admit that my cynicism is based on working in startups, where who knows what the right thing actually is, but my life experience is that managers for sure do not: they're just having meetings to ensure the workers are executing on the plan that the manager heard in their meeting
1: I am also 1000000% open to the fact that I fall into the camp of not having seen this mythical "competent manager" you started with
I agree with both of you, but consider that if this was a real meeting, you’ve both just wasted 10-15 minutes arguing about a line on the graph of a metaphor. (and yes I’ve seen this behaviour in meetings).
I agree with the original comment, as professionals we can do better than simplified analogies (or at least we should strive to)
I overheard a fascinating conversation on a plane once, about the difficulty in packaging salads/leafy vegetables. Finding the right plastic is incredibly hard, and you can’t just stick it into a paper bag. There would be so much spoilage that would far outweigh the cost and environmental impact of the throw away plastic, when you scale this to millions of units
As I understand it, plastics that come “post consumer” are too polluted to be used for anything but lowest grade of products: tyres, though probably not even that as people want “performance” from their tyres.
Where I live (UK) most plastic waste can’t be recycled yet, and they took our bins when I accidentally (optimistically) tried :(
Just like plastic use in medical setting, single use plastic straws have a similar sort of use, but they are obviously not needed everywhere.
Another source of major plastic waste is fishing, but people love their fish /shrug
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