The piecemeal engineer knows, like Socrates, how little he knows

Karl Popper (1944)

Karl Popper's reflections on totalitarianism has had one of the largest impact on my approach to software engineering.

Utopias exist in business, engineering and societal context. There are always fervent believers that have a do or die attitude to process. This often gets in the way of pragmatism.

Popper

In his reflections KP makes the argument that if we are to progress as a society we should not attempt such large scale shifts of policy in pursuit of largely frivolous utopians. There exist peoples with high levels of confidence in their ability to understand how the world and society work. We should be wary of those that are uncompromising on their ideals.

Utopian views are often stated as goals in startups and engineering. Partially due to the need to sell the dream or idea before it's realised and when they're presented to potential investors and stakeholders. "I can solve all your problems with my solution" sounds more valuable than "I can solve half of an existing problem, maybe we can think of solving the rest later?"

Within a totalitarian regime, similar promises are made to the governed by painting a picture of a utopian society, a dream world envisioned by a leader sold at the price of handing over control and power. In these cases the marketing strategy is to stoke fear and shift blame.

I have no bother with utopias if they form part of the ideation or they're used as a perspective to view a problem. It's when they're used as a justification to keep heading down a failing path, I find them to be dangerous.

If you find yourself hearing leadership or a colleague making unfalsifiable claims or using the "well it doesn't apply in this situation" instead of conceding that perhaps they were wrong; you've found the charlatan. A fear of being wrong and being averse to pivoting leads projects and businesses into failure. If you know something isn't going to work, the sooner you know and respond the better.

Sometimes, the best thing you can do is just say "I don't know".

Software Engineering at Google (pg. 40).

Ceteris paribus

The business world is run on pragmatism. If it were plagued with "too much unscientific thought"¹ it would be brought down by complexity and mess. Dijkstra attempted to reign in on software complexity in business, by advocating for writing systems that allow an engineer to focus on one single concern at a time. Least they be overwhelmed by all the moving pieces.

Similar to Popper, this is a focus on changing one thing at a time in order to determine the effect of that action. Modern day vampire Bryan Johnson, Founder of braintree, attempts to live forever by running hundreds of tests on himself. One of the largest criticisms with his approach is in how the doctors measure causality when he consumes ~106 pills every morning.

Startups and businesses that aim to solve everything are at risk of not being able to measure what's working and what's failing. They also risk avoiding their core business issues until it's too late and they're out of runway. Start ups have limited time so finding and tackling the areas of highest value to the business should be a priority, also known as, finding product market fit.

Many successful businesses started out tackling issues by focusing on a niche market. Targeting a small user base that struggles the most with an issue allows them to focus on a core problem and refine their product without being distracted by the myriad of different people and their individual needs. You can look at PayPal targeting people with thousands of transactions over Ebay, in order to refine making payments online. Revolut focused on problems that travellers faced, starting specifically with currency exchange. Nintendo got it's start selling playing cards in 1889, at this point in time I can't imagine the founder envisioned an Italian plumber eating mushrooms and rescuing princesses. The key is to move one step at a time and gaining some initial start can get your ear to the ground.

Don't be perfect

Utopia's are a constant threat to getting us into better positions. If my team is flying a burning plane and we need to land ASAP, I understand landing 10metres from the office or your home might be ideal but right now landing anywhere will do.

Perfect is the enemy of good. If we are constantly striving for a form of perfection we should acknowledge that we are delaying or forgoing getting to places that are good enough. And since Utopians are often unrelated to anyone's lived experience, there's no proof that this vision of perfect is indeed a great place to be. Which is why we need some resemblance of validation at each step of the process.

There are a number of successful companies and they are equally running numerous processes and styles of business. You might be able to find support for every methodology, if the self help expert says that eating carrots make you see in the dark, try it. But if it doesn't work, ditch it. If you're a team of one, perhaps doing daily stand ups will look different to a team of six.

Don't let the utopian process get in the way of driving value.

Lastly

Be wary of anyone that speaks with confidence and doesn't read.