Comment by charles_f
1 year ago
It's funny because this is the absolutely tell of someone who spent their entire careers in large organizations. I alternated between large and small, and it's incredible how resigned and compliant people who have been in larger orgs can be. At some point the absence of actual survival pressure creates a dichotomy between internal and external success, and only the former is important, as this article relates. It's so hard to fight the flow, that either you go with it, or you get jaded and desperate, and just leave for better pastures.
To go and call that "shipping" is a stretch in my opinion, it is only correct as far as your cynicism, semantic tolerance, or resignation to mediocrity can stretch. But with reduced perspective and a slight ego, it's hard to tell that things can be different.
how can it be any different? Someone else is paying you to do something; you either do it (aka, you please them), or you don't (aka, don't ship, and you stop getting paid).
If you dont want this, you'd need to become your own boss - in which case, you ship when you feel you've shipped! You can argue that this makes you more aligned with your customers. And i'd agree - you've made the customers your boss directly. So now, they determine if you've shipped or not.
So the only situation in which this is different (or still the same tbh), is if you're your own customer.
> how can it be any different? Someone else is paying you to do something; you either do it (aka, you please them), or you don't (aka, don't ship, and you stop getting paid).
The good situation is when you get paid to do the thing, because you're getting paid by someone who cares about whether the thing is done. The bad situation is where you get paid to make a Potemkin version of the thing because the person paying with you cares more about the appearance than the reality, consciously or otherwise. You can redefine words and say well obviously when they told you to do X they were just doing an elaborate LARP and there's no deception in doing Y and telling them it's X, but that's just sophistry.
Working for arms-length counterparties helps, as that naturally forces communication to be more explicit and honest. Working in small businesses where reality tends to intrude more quickly helps. Of course neither approach is perfect.