Make Boring Plans

183 points by kelseyhightower 5 years ago | 22 comments

jldugger 5 years ago |

What developers think when they hear 'aggressive timeline': https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y8OnoxKotPQ

What managers think: https://youtu.be/-TKjwblp1XI?t=1373

Point being, nobody gets a documentary about themselves made for delivering against a boring deadline.

hinkley 5 years ago | |

Who needs a documentary written about them?

People say they want to be famous, what they want is the adoration of their peers. When they find out the two aren't the same thing, they often have a hard time of it. Being famous means you can't have a slice of cake in peace while you contemplate the news your doctor just gave you. It means everyone gets to have an opinion about every setback you experience from then on.

Famous people are hated all the time. Or adored by people who are a worse fate than being hated.

mulmen 5 years ago | |

I was in a come to Jesus meeting where they literally played https://youtu.be/ry55--J4_VQ and said “this is what we need you to do”.

sitkack 5 years ago | | |

That is excellent, did you feel like you were inside some real-life meeting performance art? Did you brew the coffee?

whoisburbansky 5 years ago | |

Kind of amusing to find out that Myers declared personal bankruptcy, losing his stake in C.C. Myers and going on to found Myers and Sons instead. C.C. Myers (the old company) then went on to become employee-owned and later declare bankruptcy itself in 2016. Myers and Sons seems to still be going strong.

jldugger 5 years ago | | |

Wikipedia at least suggests that the bankruptcy was unrelated. I'm not gonna spend the time to find out tho.

ZephyrBlu 5 years ago | |

> What managers think

You're telling me that isn't satire?

ser0 5 years ago |

I think that "boring" is being used here as shorthand for well known and predictable, which are attributes that I would rate highly when developing a platform or trying to work on a novel problem.

I believe a contributor to why choosing boring is hard is that often the problem we encounter in software is not new or unique, but may still the be first time a team/company is attempting it. Therefore, unless you know your company has the patience for unforeseen technical difficulties, and that your team has the skillset to overcome any fundamental challenges posed by the technology chosen, even if the technology is a better fit for a problem, it may not be a good match for the organisation.

mprovost 5 years ago |

This is coming from the perspective of someone working in platform engineering. The further down the stack you are, the more conservative (aka boring) you have to be, because the blast radius increases. Quoting another great post [0] on this: "The risk profile for infrastructure is different than the applications that run on top of that infrastructure."

[0] http://cloudscaling.com/blog/devops/continuous-delusion-at-t...

loceng 5 years ago |

Creating a buffer for the unexpected allows for pleasant surprise - or possibly magic.

xwdv 5 years ago | |

Also known as lowering your expectations.

mandelbrotwurst 5 years ago | | |

That’s one way of looking at it. It could also be described as being realistic - there are always “unknown unknowns” and all else equal, no matter how motivated and capable your team, estimates that consider this will be more accurate than those that do not.

hinkley 5 years ago | | |

Or not painting yourself into a corner.

contravariant 5 years ago | | |

Mostly everyone elses, but yeah.

wgottschalk 5 years ago |

What I find interesting is that the bullet points at the end are qualities that really good Product/Project Managers have. When engineers have these skills they become a real force multiplier for their company

filereaper 5 years ago |

Boring doesn't work if the solution you've picked has flaws that the new technology addresses out-of-the-box.

You'll constantly get into arguments about why we're not deploying the new upcoming thing that obviously fixes the issue.

At some point you'll need to switch over anyways, its better to get production battle experience by trying the new tech early and rolling it out where it makes sense.

It avoids internal factions and the "shadow infrastructure" that was mentioned.

tobr 5 years ago | |

> Boring doesn't work if the solution you've picked has flaws that the new technology addresses out-of-the-box.

Problem is, the old thing has known benefits and known flaws, while the new thing has known benefits but unknown flaws.

Twirrim 5 years ago | | |

> while the new thing has known benefits but unknown flaws

I think I'd claim the new thing has _claimed_ benefits. Very often those benefits turn out to be nonsense, driven by marketing and hype cycles.

By a Tesla, it has Auto Pilot!

By autopilot we just mean some slightly more advanced driver assist, it's not actually autopilot, and if you treat it as such you're probably going to die, at best.

zdw 5 years ago | | |

This happens to be one outsized point of the earlier "Choose Boring Technology" piece that is linked: https://mcfunley.com/choose-boring-technology

xyzzy123 5 years ago | |

I read your comment as "boring is hard if your existing platform is on fire" and I totally agree with that.

The advice is that you take the new tech and do a boring thing with it first, like deploy or build something non-critical and gain the production experience that way.

The least interesting thing to do would still be to stabilise $old while carefully getting $new ready.

npunt 5 years ago | | |

Yep, in hardware this is picking a new material to work with, try it out in some smaller part that's easier to work and isn't critical, and then see its failure rate in the wild. Get used to using it before you bet on it.

ribs 5 years ago |

Does one really need to read this to get the message, which is “keep risky technology to a minimum”?