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Comment by makach | Hacker News Reader

"41. There's never enough time to do it right, but somehow, there's always enough time to do it over."

There are quite a lot of items on this list that applies to any kind of project management, software development.

This is too close to home, will enjoy responsibly.

In my experience, the opposite is often the case -- The argument: "We can't start over because we don't have enough time left" grows in strength as the project approaches the deadline and is used to justify shoddy work. (You paint yourself into a corner.)

I guess one aspect why "agile" stuff is effective, is that the "last day" (on which it becomes surprisingly easy to make all the decisions that couldn't be made until now) happens multiple times and earlier in the project.

To me this is more of a NASA thing. If a program ends up going over budget too much it gets cancelled. But the need is still there, so new program is often started up with a similar set of requirements. This problem is endemic across government aerospace programs.

NASA projects don’t get canceled for being over budget or late, they get canceled for being championed by a different administration.

Sources: - SLS - Orion - James Webb Telescope - constellation/Ares V project

One of the more egregious examples in my mind was Nixon just walking away from Apollo hardware. What a tragic waste.

It took 24 months of effort to get a particular system to barely run every hour by some contractors. After 3 weeks, I rewrote most of it and still have a month left, but it runs in 5 seconds. I'm having trouble right now convincing my boss it's better to work on the 5 second version even if he spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on the 1 hour version. It's the most annoying sunk cost ever.

I took him as being sarcastic when saying there was always time to do it over. He's ironically stating the bad logic that people use to justify introducing new technical debt.

At least, that's what I assume, since I've heard this sentiment expressed in the much clearer phrasing "If you haven't got the time to do it right, when will you find the time to do it over?".

That's apparently the title of a popular book by a management consultant named John Wooden, but I'm not sure of the provenance of the quote.

From Elon Musk "failure is an option". My take, if you aren't failing then you aren't learning.

Depends what kind of payload you have on your rocket. People or a billion-plus dollars of equipment? Or is it just a test rocket to see if it can land itself?

> People or a billion-plus dollars of equipment?

Requiring no risk of failure for people is a large part of why we don’t launch astronauts much.

Space is risky. Setting the expectation that astronauts can never be lost, as opposed to that they are on an exciting frontier that has its dangers, is out of line with astronauts’ own risk preferences. This has been a failure of expectations setting by NASA.

I'm sure it's not just for the sake of the astronauts though. Losing an astronaut is losing a massive investment and years of training.

> Losing an astronaut is losing a massive investment and years of training

Practically grounding astronauts for three decades is not much better.

Which 3 decades were astronauts practically grounded?

Who has been out of LEO lately?

I'm just saying it would be blasé to say that "risk is always an option" in regards to astronaut lives or billions of dollars of equipment.

Expanding: it should be known when failure is tolerated. Situations where it isn’t (e.g. maiden flight with astronauts) should follow ones where it is.

Being the one learning through failure in an organisation not tolerating it isn’t fun.

When the final outcome is important/worth it, failure is tolerated everywhere.

Including "maiden flight with astronauts".

Several test pilots, and astronauts died and we still went to air/space.

Failure is an option right up until you’re doing 85 on a crowded highway with passengers in the car.

With business requirements that you never reduce speed.

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