A graphic demonstration of how short-term thinking over strategy can be outright life-threatening:
I was out driving this morning on a dual carriageway, approaching a slip-road in lane two (the outside lane) so as to avoid merging traffic. In front of me is another driver who in their impatience is on the boot-lid of another vehicle, we’re right on top of the merge point for the slip-road now which is a feeder from the M4. At this point, the boot-lid surfer dives into the inside lane clearly intent on an undertake, failing to account for the motor-cycllst merging from the slip road. What follows is best described as a lucky escape with both motor-cyclist and boot-lid surfer taking evasive action.
Many a technical decision is taken without measuring, pausing for strategic thought or evaluating alternatives. What we typically do is jump on whatever is the current hype without bothering to weigh up whether it’s worth it. This is a key contributory factor to the utter absurdity that is the hype curve where we all get far too optimistic about a technology, jump on it and then after a few years realise it is not the holy grail. Techies as a group are supposed to be some of the most rational, analytical of all and yet we make this newbie mistake - who are we kidding?
Short-term thinking can be seen elsewhere too such as in the feature’s versus refactoring/re-structuring discussions that go on in software product (shrink-wrap, web or otherwise) companies across the world. In general it seems that businesses encourage these minimal thought policies. Increase customers now. Increase revenue now. Don’t worry about consequences we’ll deal with those later………maybe!
But wait a minute - if a child wants to stick their fingers in the wall-socket should we just forget the consequences and let them do it? Clearly not - that’s strategic, big picture thinking which saved our child some pain. Why don’t we do similar things and save our businesses, systems and workers pain?
I do wonder if rampant short-termism is somewhat related to our own survival instincts. Perhaps when there’s too much pressure/threat we are more likely to stop thinking about the big picture? Understandable when it’s life or death but surely unnecessary in business, tech or the daily commute?
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March 28th, 2007 at 5:08 pm
Couldn’t agree more.
Indeed, just recently I was locked in a disagreement with some developers over an optimisation directive for a database query they were working on. This directive, a part of the SQL language implementation, circumvents the DBMS’s locking mechanisms. All too often used by ill-informed developers as a notional “performance improvement”, forgetting that as volumes increase, the side effect is that queries get to see uncommitted data.
It’s fine if used very carefully, in very controlled situations, but this was applied by default. It’s unlikely too to be a problem immediately, perhaps, but in six months with twice the user base and three times the volume? Thankfully the long-term and considered view won through in the end, and they’ve ditched the directive.