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My father, a Naval officer, was quite fond of shouting "Do something, even if it's stupid!" I expect that, in the heat of battle, indecision is worse than nothing at all.
Back in the day I worked for Dave Johnson's Working Software. We scored a big contract to port Random House Webster's Electronic Dictionary And Thesaurus College Edition - yes that was its real name - from MS-DOS to Mac OS System 7. Included in our contract was $5,000 "Timely Completion Bonus" of which I would receive $3k but only if I completed the work in the allotted time.
I found myself strangely unable to get started. Dave from time to time would politely ask me whether I had, then finally he got very assertive that I should start.
"Look: if you write anything at all, even if it crashes then you can debug it."
I remembered this recently, and it is working well for me. One must not implement too much buggy code or you will never get it debugged, but writing something bad then fixing it may well be better than not implementing anything at all.
(I got my bonus.)
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Wednesday April 22 2015, @01:49AM
From outside of it, my view of army ethos is: "You need to be decided, even when its wrong". But then again... in the army survival of the actors gets a second place, coming after "achieve victory".
My distilled experience in regards with this - need to find the point of balance between:
Sometimes even the second extreme is acceptable - there are cases in which any effort to address an ill-formed problem is a waste.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford