Map-reduce, Hadoop and Clouds - When and When Not (aBlog) Cynical or Idealistic? Embrace technical debt. Financial debt plays an important and positive role in our economy under normal conditions. Yet, especially in times like these, it’s easy to rail against the badness of being in debt; it’s a very human feeling. Remember Hamlet? LORD POLONIUS:Neither a borrower nor a lender be;For loan oft loses both itself and friend,And borrowing dulls the edge of husbandry.
Technical debt works the same way, and has the same perils. Here’s one of my favorite introductions to the subject, courtesy of Martin Fowler: In this metaphor, doing things the quick and dirty way sets us up with a technical debt, which is similar to a financial debt. The human tendency to moralize about debt affects engineers, too. In this post, I want to challenge that idea, by talking about real-world situations where debt is highly valuable. I won’t pretend that there aren’t teams that take on technical debt for bad reasons. The metaphor also explains why it may be sensible to do the quick and dirty approach. One last thought. Escaping the Job Trap: Its a Matter of Time, NOT Money! An Artic. "Sixty percent of families have so little savings that, if they lost their jobs, they could sustain their lifestyles for only about one month. The next richest twenty percent could only hold out for three and a half months.
" --Source: Rosemary Brown & Cindy Mitlo. "It Pays to Plan. " Co-op America's Financial Planning Handbook. 2001 Edition. Page 8. Escaping the Job Trap Its a Matter of Time, NOT Money! By Thomas J. As someone who has successfully built a resource-efficient home and a green publishing business, people often ask me what they can do to make their own life situations more sustainable. I meet a lot of people with great Dreams. It is unfortunate to see wave after wave of kids graduate from school and fall into the same trap.
Realizing that this flipping hamburger thing won't do, Junior goes off to college, accumulates more debt for student loans and works an eight-hour shift each day after school to keep the cash flowing. Consider a lightbulb. Google Puts Lid on New Products - Los Angeles Times. Creating Strategy in an Unknowable Universe - HBS Working Knowle. In his book The Origin of Wealth, Eric D. Beinhocker argues that a radical new view sees economics as a highly dynamic and evolving system with implications for companies and organizations everywhere. An excerpt. by Eric D. Beinhocker Editor's note: In his new book The Origin of Wealth, McKinsey & Company Senior Advisor Eric D. Strategy as a portfolio of experiments The key to doing better is to "bring evolution inside" and get the wheels of differentiation, selection, and amplification spinning within a company's four walls. Let's return to the Microsoft story and imagine it is now the year 1987, six years after Gates signed the contract with IBM.
We can imagine the options that Microsoft faced at this point. All these options would involve big commitments to hard-to-reverse courses of action and involve major risks. First, Microsoft continued to invest in MS-DOS. Second, Microsoft saw IBM as a real threat. Sixth and finally, Gates made major investments in Windows. Footnotes: 35. 36.