Comment by jasode | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jasode | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

>its massive length but wasn’t able to make it shorter

It's always possible to make it shorter to help communicate a main idea. (However, it does takes extra effort to extract the essence of a long piece.[1]) Your essay is ~15,000 words and desperately needs a short "elevator pitch" of its main points. I'm a very verbose writer so when I think others' writing is verbose, it means everybody is going to drown in the text.

Here's my summary of what I think you're trying to say:

1: There psychological problems with deadlines and large bug lists that cause counterproductive results

2: I discuss 2 psychological "tricks" in software development to counteract the unwanted behavior

2.a: Estimate software by abstract units such as "points" instead of concrete units such as "time/hours/weeks". The abstract units bypass the human biases that lead to bad estimates. Use the points to determine "relative" sizes of each "story". (E.g. Developers vote to converge on the "size" of each story point.) The last step is to multiply the points by a unit of time to derive a finish date.

2.b: Do not have a big global list of bugs to burn down. The size would be overwhelming and demoralizing to teams. Instead, triage bugs into smaller "hot lists" so they "see" a smaller manageable queue to work on. Also, measuring bug fix times will eventually let you derive an "average bug size" that's reasonably accurate

The tldr would be something like "Here are 2 counterproductive management techniques with setting deadlines and assigning bug fix work -- and here are 2 ways to counteract it with management ideas that take advantage of human psychology."

Somebody else can wordsmith it better than I can but that's what I think your essay is basically about. The 15000 words are mostly examples or background ideas leading up to your recommendations (SLO vs SLA, Tesla, what I like don't like about Agile, Kanban, etc).

I recommend that you put your strongest main points at the very top to give your readers the mental scaffolding to hang the rest of your 15000 words on.

[1] "I would have written a shorter letter, but I did not have the time." -- Blaise Pascal : https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Blaise_Pascal

I know what you mean, and in general I try to follow that advice. In the particular case of project management though, I'm frustrated by the huge amount of too-short and contradictory advice floating around on the Internet; adding one more unjustified summary to the pile doesn't help. So I think the extra details are important. And when you have that many details, the tangential expository fluff helps keep it interesting. I hope.

This is also why I didn't summarize everything at the top: that would encourage people to just read the top and stop there. They can do that with project management advice anywhere on the Internet. There's a place for that, but there's plenty of it already.

At least it's shorter than a book. :)

>So I think the extra details are important. [...] This is also why I didn't summarize everything at the top: that would encourage people to just read the top and stop there.

There's an opposite way to look at it: a good summary acts as a "hook" and entices readers to read the rest of 15000 words. I wasn't suggesting you delete the extra details. Instead, the bullet points at the top give the reader a "road map" to the rest of the long article.

>They can do that with project management advice anywhere on the Internet.

Well, you said the other articles out there are contradictory ("doesn't work and makes things worse") so there's your hook: you have a superior method.

If you prefer to write in a style that "unfolds" that's understandable. A writer can hold an opinion on the best way to present his ideas.

That said, I'll offer some counterpoint. A web surfer may have 20 browser tabs open as a "todo list" of unread blogs. The email inbox has a bunch of unread messages. There's also a stack of new candidate resumes he's supposed to read. That random person then clicks on your blog and sees the shaded rectangle in the scroll bar get real tiny which visually indicates it's a very long piece of text. 15000 words is ~1 hour of reading.

Since you're not a household name among famous authors, a lot of people just won't start reading it on faith alone. They don't trust you enough yet that it will eventually unfold with an amazing insight. Instead, many busy people will just ignore it because there are so many other items competing for their attention. In particular, the project managers and business executives you want to reach and internalize your recommendations are especially prone to skip long articles. One hour articles are really making a huge demand from multitasking managers so they need a nudge to see if it's worth their time.

There's a glut of information overload out there and long articles can act as "RADIOACTIVE - DO NOT ENTER" signs to the people you most want to convince of your ideas.

I agree. This is the internet, after all. The first question is: Is this worth my time and attention?

I decided it was worth my time and attention because the HN comments were mostly positive. Once I skipped the personal intro, the argument was sufficiently engaging to keep me going.

I think the author is partly right that a breakdown might be more harmful because you lose too much information. HN and reddit comments are how I decide whether something is worth my time, so a summary isn't necessarily beneficial.

FWIW, I liked this format. It reads like a presentation and digresses and regroups back to the main thread throughout. It may make it less widely read but I think it may also make it more memorable and loved.

The value for the reader is in the act of chewing over a familiar problem along with your guidance. If the main points were made more obvious, then perhaps it also becomes more boring.

If you want to propose a more tangible recommendation/guide/process then yeah, give people hooky, easy to remember bits.

TL;DR thanks. ++good writing advice

Reply on news.ycombinator.com