Systems design explains the world: volume 1
Metadata
Highlights
- called Being Glue
- perfectly captures this effect. In her words: "Glue work is expected when you’re senior… and risky when you’re not."
- Most of all, systems design is invisible to people who don’t know how to look for it. At least with code, you can measure output by the line or the bug, and you can hire more programmers to get more code. With systems design, the key insight might be a one-sentence explanation given at the right time to the right person, that affects the next 5 years of work, or is the difference between hypergrowth and steady growth.
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"Informal, unacknowledged, and unaccountable leadership" is just as common in distributed computing systems as it is in human social systems. The truth is, nearly every attempt to design a hierarchy-free, "flat" control system just moves the central control around until you can’t see it anymore. Human structures all have leaders, whether implicit or explicit, and the explicit ones tend to be more diverse.
- But no! Just like with real chickens and real eggs, there’s a way to do it by bootstrapping from something smaller. The main techniques are to lower the cost of adoption, and to deliver more value even when there are fewer users.
- What makes the Innovator’s Dilemma so beautiful, from a systems design point of view, is the "dilemma" part. The dilemma comes from the fact that all large companies are heavily optimized to discard ideas that aren’t as profitable as their existing core business.
- The main trick is to determine whether you actually have one of these exact "disruption" things. They’re rare. And as an early startup, you don’t yet have a historical plot like the one above that spells it out; you have to guess that you’ll realistically be able to improve your thing faster than the incumbent can improve theirs, over a long period of time.