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Physics and perception. | Irrational Exuberance

lethain.com · 1,916 words · saved by 1 readers

At one point in 2019, several parts of Stripe’s engineering organization were going through a polite civil war. The conflict was driven by one group’s belief that Java should replace Ruby. Java would, they posited, address the ongoing challenge of delivering a quality platform in the face of both a rapidly growing business and a rapidly growing engineering organization. The other group believed Stripe’s problems were driven by a product domain with high essential complexity and numerous, demanding external partners ranging from users to financial institutions to governments; switching programming languages wouldn’t address any of those issues. I co-wrote the internal version of Magnitudes of exploration in an attempt to find a useful framework for navigating that debate, but nonetheless the two groups struggled to make much progress in understanding one another. I was reminded of those discussions while reading Steven Sinofsky’s Hardcore Software’s chapter on Innovation versus Shipping

At one point in 2019, several parts of Stripe’s engineering organization were going through a polite civil war. The conflict was driven by one group’s belief that Java should replace Ruby. Java would, they posited, address the ongoing challenge of delivering a quality platform in the face of both a rapidly growing business and a rapidly growing engineering organization. The other group believed Stripe’s problems were driven by a product domain with high essential complexity and numerous, demanding external partners ranging from users to financial institutions to governments; switching programm

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