I truly sympathize with the problem (edit - was ‘idea’) of normalizing deviance (wonderful term, that), but I have to say that when it comes to dealing with companies (make that organizations of any sort), my experience has been that those companies doing things right have almost inevitably lost to those who have normalized at least a certain amount of deviance.
Since I’m a huge proponent of “doing things right”, I hate the realization that for the most part customers don’t care about things being done right. Until you reach a tipping point, customers basically don’t factor reliability and robustness in their purchasing decisions. Sure, in the long term, you are taking risks that can destroy the product, but the other fact is for most products, there is no long term.
Given the rate of technological progress, in 5-10 years, both the good and the bad products may well cease to exist altogether, so planning everything around the long-term becomes foolishness…
People talk about the producer stupidity and greed, but when I look at it, I only see companies giving customers what they really want (as shown by their purchasing decisions), as opposed to what they say they want.
I suspect that if I’d power and influence, I could have driven a few successful companies into the ground by insisting they get rid of their deviance…
And yes, I’m certain that the deviance is occasionally low hanging stupidity that has a quick return on investing in it’s removal. But in every case I’ve seen (and that’s been a few), it’s far more deep-seated and costly to fix than that. It’s far more about removing the 2/3rds of the badly implemented features that no-one uses and rewriting core code for robustness. And then finding out that purchasers may not use those removed features, but that’s how they evaluate competing products.
The core lesson I’ve learned from growing older. Most stupidity exists for a very real reason. May be illogical, likely to be aggravating, but it’s still very real. Stupidity that’s just stupid is actually pretty rare.
I expect corporations to be stupid and destructive. All I ask is that these “real reasons” you speak of be discoverable by me. Too many companies find it in their interest to keep the reasons secret, and in my opinion this is the greater sin. And a large part of why so many people are now angry and frustrated with the world–while, materially, they have never been better off.
“Because reasons” is the new “plausible deniability”.
It’s called market control, which enables institutional laziness and MASSIVE, reliable, profit margins. One of the few things basic econ gets wrong is that economic profit inevitably reverts to a baseline. It does not under oligopoly.
Saw Luu’s article a few days back when it was posted to news.ycombinator.com.
As someone who is trying to push better devops practices in my company, I sort of boggled at the statement that 2 9’s are bad.
I can think of a single group in my company that has managed to best the “it compiles on my machine” stupid programmer problem. There are dozens of products.
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