Re:"Not Rocket Science": The story of Monotone and Bors
by tokenrove on Monday August 18, 2014 @11:41AM
(#8193116)
I disagree with your most general statement, and I feel this quote better reflects my experience:
Don't worry about people stealing your ideas. If your
ideas are any good, you'll have to ram them down people's
throats.
-- Howard Aiken
Re:"Not Rocket Science": The story of Monotone and Bors
by mtdewcmu on Monday August 18, 2014 @05:11PM
(#8194703)
I think the reason we're not seeing eye to eye is that we're applying different standards. That quote makes a point PG has made (IIRC). He concluded that great startups don't naturally follow from great ideas. That's because ideas alone are seldom so great that they do all the work on their own: you still have to execute, and good execution is underrated.
This article is claiming to have an idea so great that literally anyone can employ it and benefit from it, though, and that's an awfully high standard.
Re:"Not Rocket Science": The story of Monotone and Bors
by kenko on Sunday August 17, 2014 @08:27PM
(#8190969)
"Just general commentary. If something really, truly works and you can prove it, then everyone will adopt it."
This is charmingly naive.
Re:"Not Rocket Science": The story of Monotone and Bors
by mtdewcmu on Sunday August 17, 2014 @08:55PM
(#8191035)
Here's an example of something that truly works: git. I don't think git was adopted because Linus is a silver-tongued salesman. I think the cost-benefit analysis was just lopsided in git's favor, and everyone adopted it. The reason it doesn't happen more often is that there aren't that many truly good, production-ready ideas out there that haven't already been done.
Re:"Not Rocket Science": The story of Monotone and Bors
by haberman on Sunday August 17, 2014 @08:42PM
(#8191005)
Maybe so, but you would have a more convincing (counter-)argument if you offered some counterexamples.
Re:"Not Rocket Science": The story of Monotone and Bors
by tbrownaw on Sunday August 17, 2014 @09:47PM
(#8191133)
To start with, anything covered by the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principal%E2%80%93agent_proble... .
Re:"Not Rocket Science": The story of Monotone and Bors
by mtdewcmu on Sunday August 17, 2014 @11:48PM
(#8191359)
Technophiles have a tendency to fall in love with ideas that no one else cares about and assert that people that dont see what they see are fools. But capitalism enforces a degree of honesty. If you can put a cash value on the productivity gain some idea will provide, and it's a significant sum, then it's not much of a stretch to predict that it will prevail eventually. If the idea has no significant cash value, then it's only a mediocre idea. Sometimes we tech people have to be humble and accept that something we love is mediocre (especially when we try to start a company based on the idea and no one buys it).
If it doesn't really, truly work, one reason could be that most corporate developers can barely write working code; writing test code that will hold the whole project up if/when it fails -- that's beyond what you could trust the average developer to write.
It may work well when you have a top-notch developer to write tests, or when the goals of the project are especially amenable to automated testing, but in the common case cause too much friction.
Edit: a more sinister reason that automated testing isn't used more, even if it might deliver better software, is that a lot of companies that are in the software business don't care much about defects. Many seem to care more about shipping features, even if those features are half-assed and buggy, than about shipping code that works. But, even so -- we're talking about no-brainers here. Even shoddy companies eventually adopt really obvious better practices, even if only by following the herd.