Some reflections on when to deduplicate work with others
In the past I used to be pretty serious about trying to deduplicate my work w.r.t others. E.g. I didn’t want to work on things that others had said they were going to do; this would cause me to abandon projects that I would otherwise have been excited to do
I now think that I was being too neurotic about this. Firstly, the other party might not even end up doing the thing. Secondly, they might not do the version of it that you are most excited about, so you don’t learn as much. Thirdly, you often learn a lot from doing the thing anyway, and this is sometimes more important than the object-level outcome. Lastly, usually it’s fine for there to be more than one ongoing effort in any given space [“oh boy, two cakes!”]
The YAGNI principle is probably good to follow—only deduplicate if you’re facing an immediate, concrete, pressing reason to do so.
The famous Bezos reaction to someone trying to remove duplication across teams, was to write
0 < 2 < 1
With the lesson being don’t deduplicate until at least one of the instances is actually successful.
edit: I got the sequence wrong: someone asserted that they should combine duplicative projects, or eliminate one to save costs, asserting “2 < 1” as a shorthand for “two is worse than one”. This is naively true, both for costs and to minimize customer confusion. Bezos added the “0 <” to make the point that there is risk of failure in new projects, and it’s often worth the expense in order to ensure that at least one succeeds.
Some reflections on when to deduplicate work with others
In the past I used to be pretty serious about trying to deduplicate my work w.r.t others. E.g. I didn’t want to work on things that others had said they were going to do; this would cause me to abandon projects that I would otherwise have been excited to do
I now think that I was being too neurotic about this. Firstly, the other party might not even end up doing the thing. Secondly, they might not do the version of it that you are most excited about, so you don’t learn as much. Thirdly, you often learn a lot from doing the thing anyway, and this is sometimes more important than the object-level outcome. Lastly, usually it’s fine for there to be more than one ongoing effort in any given space [“oh boy, two cakes!”]
The YAGNI principle is probably good to follow—only deduplicate if you’re facing an immediate, concrete, pressing reason to do so.
The famous Bezos reaction to someone trying to remove duplication across teams, was to write
With the lesson being don’t deduplicate until at least one of the instances is actually successful.
edit: I got the sequence wrong: someone asserted that they should combine duplicative projects, or eliminate one to save costs, asserting “2 < 1” as a shorthand for “two is worse than one”. This is naively true, both for costs and to minimize customer confusion. Bezos added the “0 <” to make the point that there is risk of failure in new projects, and it’s often worth the expense in order to ensure that at least one succeeds.