I think that’s an incomplete lesson about startups. Yes, talk is cheap, but also you probably misdiagnosed the hard part, and your description to enthusiastic users didn’t match your delivered product. Both reviewing colleges and studying poker are relatively simple coding projects and quite difficult content problems. How well an app solves those problems is very little about UI or algorithms, it’s about generation, curation, and transformation-for-specific-user-needs of information. I can’t tell from your description how much of the real problems you were able to address before becoming discouraged at lack of use.
I work as a very senior engineer (not so much a programmer anymore), formerly at very large companies, currently at a medium-sized company (~130 engineers and managers), and I will say that the binary feedback (success/failure) is far less immediate, but the actual usable feedback (who is doing what, what features are being asked for, and overall whether to invest more or less in the team) is there, as long as anyone cares to look (and either I’ve been very lucky, or it’s rather common for many to care).
It’s unclear what version of socialism you’re talking about, so I don’t have a lot to say on that topic. I think there’s a lot of modeling value in exploring the nuances of legible vs il- or semi-legible, and who gets to pick the KPIs and weighting among them. My base opinion is that the universe is it’s own best model, too finely-detailed to summarize perfectly inside a small segment of itself (a brain or computer cluster). So “legible” is ALWAYS about abstractions and models, which means the hard part is realizing that it’s going to be wrong in many cases.
I think that’s an incomplete lesson about startups. Yes, talk is cheap, but also you probably misdiagnosed the hard part, and your description to enthusiastic users didn’t match your delivered product. Both reviewing colleges and studying poker are relatively simple coding projects and quite difficult content problems. How well an app solves those problems is very little about UI or algorithms, it’s about generation, curation, and transformation-for-specific-user-needs of information. I can’t tell from your description how much of the real problems you were able to address before becoming discouraged at lack of use.
I work as a very senior engineer (not so much a programmer anymore), formerly at very large companies, currently at a medium-sized company (~130 engineers and managers), and I will say that the binary feedback (success/failure) is far less immediate, but the actual usable feedback (who is doing what, what features are being asked for, and overall whether to invest more or less in the team) is there, as long as anyone cares to look (and either I’ve been very lucky, or it’s rather common for many to care).
It’s unclear what version of socialism you’re talking about, so I don’t have a lot to say on that topic. I think there’s a lot of modeling value in exploring the nuances of legible vs il- or semi-legible, and who gets to pick the KPIs and weighting among them. My base opinion is that the universe is it’s own best model, too finely-detailed to summarize perfectly inside a small segment of itself (a brain or computer cluster). So “legible” is ALWAYS about abstractions and models, which means the hard part is realizing that it’s going to be wrong in many cases.