I think I had a minor epiphany today, about work. I’ve always had this difficult-to-pin-down thought about why we do certain things, and how we should be doing certain things, and how I’m eternally restless about things I perceive as “broken” but feel powerless to fix. It finally hit me.
In short, our particular niche is completely bipolar. On the one hand, I’m constantly railing that we need to be “agile”, we should be making copious use of new technologies and methodologies, we should be able to build the company on laptops at a Starbucks.
These things are true. Our main app is a fucking PHP script. Agility should be our “secret” weapon.
But, that’s not entirely the case all the time. First, there’s a difference between a typical Silicon Valley startup (eg, Digg) and us: oh yeah both are LAMP+secret sauce, but we have so many more considerations. We deal in actual money, we have actual paying customers whose entire income may come from our app. Security is beyond important. Features get added not just to entice new customers and impress current ones, but to deal with real business problems.
Put another way, this side of our business is firmly rooted in the traditional BigCo software development methodology. We should have notebooks full of UML diagrams, and be genuinely concerned about design patterns, and use zOMG FRSRS this-that-and-the-other (CI, etc). Eg, no hacky solution to a problem them move on; documented in triplicate after being tested to death.
Bridging these dual worlds is pretty much impossible. I think every company, at some point, wants to be “big” without being overly formal, bureaucratic, and process-heavy. I’m pretty sure it never works, too, if the various “how to manage a tech company” sections at B&N are any indication.
Some companies manage; I would assume 37Signals manages to be “enterprise” without the bullshit. But not every company can be them: it’s not that we’re not awesome but our mix of product, personalities, and customers is not the same, so it’s always apples to oranges. You can’t just WW37SD? because you are not them!
So that’s where we are, and one of the many reasons why I’m so grumpy. We keep missing the glorious, glorious 10-ring of Big Company Process To Protect Us From Ourselves and Little Cowboy Hacker Shop.
