Always Budget To Do It Wrong
Always Budget to Do it Wrong
Why is there always budget to do it wrong, but never to fix it?
The shortest possible answer I have is: money. The second is: aggressive strategies are usually better than reactive strategies.
This isn’t a guide, but more referencing the reality of the society you’re a part of. It’s more of a narrative guide to why you won’t be allowed to work on the thing you want to.
A system that is 10% working is better than 0%, I guess
If you are making something to sell, or a tool to fix a problem, then perfect is the enemy of good. If you haven’t seen this or experienced a project where this has happened you are lucky.
Here’s a basic setup for why perfection tanks a project: You have a group of invested and passionate people. You have highly analytical engineers who have been able to affect their world with attention to detail. They’ve seen that if they put more time into a project, then you get better results.
If your engineer is not experienced in shipping, then they can put fixes in the path of partial releases, and this causes everything to slow down. Slowing down is death in business, as in everyone loses their jobs and the guy whose loan you were riding on loses his principle.
A simple reversal of the error (perfect is the enemy of good) becomes ship anything, don’t fix things.
This works, so we don’t explore the space and build a default strategy.
At least, it works in that you can ship something and maybe fix it later. This follows the principle of generating revenue rather than reducing losses.
Stress Affects Your Ability to Reason
When you’re under stress, your reasoning changes. The effects are not simple, nor is reasoning.
This metanalysis indicates varied changes in multiple forms of decision making and changes to mental capacities when under stress. Changes in memory - short-term vs. long-term consequence valuation - and basic changes to favor reactive stimulus-response actions may mean that under stress your organization will make simple calculations and skip analytical thinking.
This may be a better outcome than constant analysis. While a longer term plan may gain better returns (not guaranteed), consider that in a lot of businesses people don’t stick around for times that expand beyond 10 years.
Most people won’t stick around more than 5 years, The BLM states 3.9 years in 2024. Even most CEOs last less than 8 years so what can we expect?
If your strategy takes longer than 4 years to work, you probably won’t see it pan out. If your boss isn’t staying for 4 years, who cares if your actions will have long-term repercussions after then?
Seriously, most people don’t care about stuff that doesn’t concern them personally. At all. This is a pretty normal thing, even if it’s jarring to think about, and borderline misanthropic.
If you’re aware that you or your boss or your CEO won’t be here in 4 years, then why make a plan further than that? No one will reward or scold you, unless someone up the chain actually cares about that specific outcome.
If you’re even reading this somehow, you may be in a small minority of people who’ve noticed that we plan suboptimally, wondered why, and bothered to look into it. Ask an economist for some form of an authoritative answer, but my take is that we’re in a rat race most of the time and lighting some money on fire to get a bigger pile of money is the best option we can see most times.
Training is hard to measure, so why bother
Training and getting better at things is an admirable pursuit. It’s good to learn new things.
If you’re running a business, it’s really really hard to know how much you or your employees have learned in a way that’s helpful.
If you tell an employee to learn a skill for 10% of their time while employed, how much better (or worse) is that? Is it worth losing 10% of your total output?
The answer to this is hard to figure out, and the question might be malformed.
In the end, it’s simpler to ask for 100% output, ignore training, and focus on short-term revenue generation: i.e. doing it wrong. It’s easier than trying to figure out how to do it right - there’s not many indicators of progress during this process. On the flip side, if you push to produce something, and it fails, you can get data on how it’s failing.
Most Managers are Bad Risk takers
An observation I’ve seen is that managers aren’t usually “leaders” per se. They don’t typically do things you associate with leadership. In fact, you may not be surprised (as I was) that managers don’t have to be leaders, despite the narrative surrounding their position. As I see it leaders do the following:
- establish consensus or community
- inspire their community
- make judgement calls for the best of the community: i.e. taking risks
All 3 of these are nice and even valuable to have in a manager. They are not required to do the job.
You can have a manager or boss who sucks at all 3 of these. In fact, we know this happens a decent amount of time, because we have media that’s built up around this premise. The Office, one of the United State’s most successful sitcoms, includes this realization in several characters. Classically, Steve Carrell’s character might actually be pretty good leader, but a terrible manager. Higher-ups are terrible “leaders”" in comparison, but maybe by sheer force of reality they have to be semi-effective managers.
I guess it’s in the name they’re “managers,” they only wrangle employees.
Even Forbes calls out the split.
Financial Calculus
So with all this in mind, why is there budget to do it wrong?
The people calling the shots don’t inherently want to do it right, they’re meeting some goal, not crafting art, not creating “correct” solutions. They’re aiming to get a task done. Usually it’s because they’re there to make more money for the guy that employs them.
If you’re a manager who’s responsible for making software to sell to a customer and there are 2 paths given to you by your engineers:
- Make the product in 1 week and fix bugs as we go
- Make the product in 1 month, but with no bugs.
Which would or should you pick? In most cases, you’re going to want to go with /# 1 every time; you can start making money 4 times faster. Even if /#2 is technically better, if your business goes under in 2 weeks, you still failed.
The math doesn’t always pan out, but adding in other factors, such as uncertainty surrounding outcomes or unexpected setbacks there’s not many reasons to want to go back to fix things.
If you’re not pragmatic enough to accept that whatever you’re doing probably does have to generate money at some point then either you’ve ascended to a higher societal existence (happy for you), are stupid rich and don’t have to work / aren’t doing it seriously, are working a bullshit job, or you’re asleep to the reality that you actually are making money.
There’s Always Budget to Do It Wrong; Never Budget to Fix it
The basic problem here is incentives. You’re typically not there to fix things, you’re there to generate revenue. This framing has made the decisions from the top make sense.
Do I like this? No; it sucks.
I don’t like that all of the software I have to use in my daily life doesn’t work well. I don’t like it that we’re driven to enshitificaton, and not just by the hyper-wealthy CEO’s who run the world, but by the economic framework we’ve created for ourselves.
I don’t have an answer for why it has to be this way, but hopefully this can help you understand that these decisions have a sort of logic behind them. I’m currently reading The Toyota Way to see if there’s an answer since they pursue “long term thinking,” as a goal, and Toyota has done pretty well all things considered.