Comment by andai
9 hours ago
So previously the bottleneck was production. I'd wager now the bottleneck is willingness to test your hypotheses. The willingness to experience failure as soon as possible. To test and iterate.
As technology brings the cost of everything else to 0, psychological costs will predominate.
Reality testing is ultimately unavoidable, of course, but I'd guess most people still lean away from that rather than into it. (Our whole culture is set up that way, and most of us get like two decades of Pavlovian conditioning in that direction.)
Edit: Expanded here: https://nekolucifer.substack.com/p/willingness-to-fail-is-no...
Add on the compounding effect that "QA" or "test" in someone's job description was viewed as a synonym for "less-highly compensated" over the past few decades, and you have an entire generation of mid career devs with poorly adapted instincts regarding what is valuable in the process of shipping working product.
The bottleneck was never coding...
I keep seeing people say that, but the bottleneck really was, to a large degree, writing the code.
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The ability to endure some degree of suffering seems essential for building high quality products. Getting in front of the customer as often as possible and proving things end to end is very painful. But it provides the most feedback and gets you aligned quickly.
If you want an example of the polar opposite, the TDD idea seems to be a good fit. Unit tests are a perfect little universe that you can always control. All side effects and scary possibilities can be handwaved away under mocks. The psychological power of having control over everything is what draws so many toward the idea. A deterministic guarantee that the little circles will turn green when you press play every time is painless.
Failing tests are the most informative and you can only develop those by meaningful interaction with the customer's requirements. If you aren't constantly fighting a wave of red in your testing suite, it's likely you are too isolated from reality.
I agree, and a willingness to experience failure as soon as possible has always been a competitive advantage.
If anything LLM chatbots & synthetic users will make the majority of founders evermore comfortable not testing reality.