Re:Strategy: Solve Only 80 Percent of the Problem
by ams6110 on Friday August 28, 2009 @04:59PM
(#792282)
Or unless those "other things" have unlikely but potentially really bad consequences.
Most of the time, maybe 80% of the time avionics software does not need to contend with the plane flying through a thunderstorm. But I hope that the programmers didn't just toss that possibility into the "not important" category.
The "80/20" rule is something MBA types like to toss out so that they sound wise, but in some cases it's needs to be more like the 99.80/00.20 rule.
Re:Strategy: Solve Only 80 Percent of the Problem
by runevault on Friday August 28, 2009 @05:03PM
(#792286)
When working with code that's effort has lives on the line, the rules obviously change entirely. How many people ACTUALLY work on such systems though? For the majority the 80/20 rule is going to be fairly legit a large portion of the time.
Re:Strategy: Solve Only 80 Percent of the Problem
by cema on Friday August 28, 2009 @10:07PM
(#792664)
The 80/20 rule is self-applicable and so applies to 80% of cases. (Captain Obvious said hi.)
Re:Strategy: Solve Only 80 Percent of the Problem
by cema on Saturday August 29, 2009 @12:20AM
(#792770)
If the "80" here is reasonably accurate, then here is what we have: in 80% of the cases, we only have to focus on 80% of stuff (that's about 64% of the total), and in the rest 20% we focus almost on 100% of stuff (that's almost 20% of the total), which means that we need to focus on almost 64+20=84% of the total, which is still pretty close to the original 80%. :-) OK, this is silly. (We can only get it equal when we go with 100% instead of 80%.)
That depends on how important the project is. It would be worth it for Google to have someone optimize add-words for a full year even if they only got an extra click per 1/50,000 page views. However, that much attention to detail is useless when you have far fewer users / revenue. The secret is to focus on the highest reward areas and shift focus when other things become more important.