Re:What Silicon Valley gets about engineers that traditional...
by 3pt14159 on Monday January 11, 2021 @05:54AM
(#25727223)
Business isn't really all that complicated. It's just opaque and intersects with other things that are complicated, like finance and law.
But the man who invented 1-800-GOT-JUNK and plastered the phone number on the side of every one of his bins was not some better of Richard Feynman. He understood one thing really well: If you solve a problem, have simple messaging, and unabashedly self-promote you will win.
The lawyers, and accountants, and technologists, will all come and help you with the complicated stuff in exchange for a piece of that mountain of cash.
Re:What Silicon Valley gets about engineers that traditional...
by toyg on Monday January 11, 2021 @08:14AM
(#25728432)
Business is just dependent on thousands of factors that are fundamentally impossible to control. You can model pretty much every factor of it, individually, but you can't model the whole matrix because some parameters are random and wide (earthquakes, pandemics, etc) and some you cannot account for (were you were born and from whom, what education you get and where, who you can befriend, how your brain works, etc etc).
I think one has to differentiate between "complex" and "complicated". Complex stuff requires Big Brains. Business is not complex, all its processes are simple and fairly well-understood; but it is complicated by the interaction of so many factors.
Science is "easy" because we can model it, to a degree.
Non-science is so hard that we can't even model it, it's that complicated. So instead we try to voodoo our way around it, rely on simple heuristics, history, etc.