It’s been a few weeks since I listened to this German podcast episode about the downfall of a company called Schlecker and I keep thinking about an anecdote one of the hosts shared.
ugggh what a great read. it reminds me of the comment in hacker news about storytelling vs advice. it may all be in the stories, as it is our more complex approach to giving advice.
Thanks for sharing these stories, I like the spirit.
In regards of:
"I’ve got a story about a CEO who hacked together a small prototype in HTML and jQuery for a whole day"
Hm, this seems like the common antipattern of "heros at work". Usually it's a founder or tech-lead who does that heroic job (working IN the product or company, instead of ON it) and of course: these stories always end good.
In one of my former companies the senior founder did the same, over the weekend, without telling anyone. Tested? Well, to some degree, sure. But it escaped into production. Fixed that by installing a transparent shadow code repository, where the found could do whatever he feels like, and it had a few extra review steps before it got integrated into the live code base. That's kind of a dark hack, and doesn't seem to be very honest, but it worked then. The founder never found out, and never bothered with any dev processes in place, because, well it's my company and I do it my way.
Anyway, all the other stories are about "leaders who eat last".
ugggh what a great read. it reminds me of the comment in hacker news about storytelling vs advice. it may all be in the stories, as it is our more complex approach to giving advice.
Thanks!
Hi Thorsten,
This was a great read!
Just a quick question: how do you find so many good blog posts? You always have such great content in the “Joy & Curiosity” section.
HackerNews, Twitter, mostly.
Thanks for sharing these stories, I like the spirit.
In regards of:
"I’ve got a story about a CEO who hacked together a small prototype in HTML and jQuery for a whole day"
Hm, this seems like the common antipattern of "heros at work". Usually it's a founder or tech-lead who does that heroic job (working IN the product or company, instead of ON it) and of course: these stories always end good.
In one of my former companies the senior founder did the same, over the weekend, without telling anyone. Tested? Well, to some degree, sure. But it escaped into production. Fixed that by installing a transparent shadow code repository, where the found could do whatever he feels like, and it had a few extra review steps before it got integrated into the live code base. That's kind of a dark hack, and doesn't seem to be very honest, but it worked then. The founder never found out, and never bothered with any dev processes in place, because, well it's my company and I do it my way.
Anyway, all the other stories are about "leaders who eat last".