The Algorithm
by Gordon Weakliem
I’ve been reading (listening, actually) to Isaacson’s book on Elon Musk. His timing in releasing the book was pretty exquisite and I wish that I’d listened a year ago.
Having a billion dollars isn’t enough to be a Real Billionaire, Real Billionaires have their philosophy defined as a list. Bezos has the 14 leadership principles. Dalio has his Principles. Musk has The Algorithm. He also has another list of “Lessons from Videogames” but that doesn’t get repeat mentions like The Algorithm:
- Question every requirement
- Delete any part of the process you can
- Simplify and optimize
- Accelerate cycle time
- Automate
Step one is definitely a place to run into Chesterton’s Fence, but going back to first principles is worth doing in every case where you weren’t around for the first principles. Cargo-culting is very real and there are so many things that we do because that’s the way we learned to do them. The rest looks like good engineering. I’ve fallen for the automation trap as a variant on premature optimization, letting go of the feeling that it’s the professionally responsible thing to do and therefore non-negotiable has been very liberating.
There’s no part of this where you design or define requirements, you just start optimizing it in step 2. That’s a very 20th century, post-agile attitude, we acquired a disdain for design. But there’s always an urge for software engineers to whine about requirements, or the lack of them.