đżď¸ Nutritious Spaghetti - The Insanely Profitable Tech Newsletter
Originally published 15th July 2024
Iâm leading off with two exciting announcements. The first is that from 15 August 2024 I will be launching my Insanely Profitable Tech podcast, a fortnightly broadcast featuring conversations with executives and business thinkers, all talking about how they use technology creatively and how to make their ideas practical and applicable for you. In an unusual twist, Iâll be recording each podcast episode live in my usual Thursday slot, and youâre invited to come along and participate with insights and questions. Sign up for the first recording, and watch this space for more on the launch including additional ways to participate. (Donât fret Troubleshooting Agile fans, Jeffrey and I arenât going anywhere!)
And the second announcement is that I have a rare opportunity for an enterprising entrepreneur to get involved with a number of my private equity clients who are looking for a technical solution to a problem that they desperately donât want to solve themselves. If you know fintech or venture capital well and are looking for a project, or you know someone who is, get a message to me and weâll see what works.
Emanuil had taught himself to code, and it showed. As the only programmer on staff at a company shipping four thousand new products every week, heâd had to support an intricately choreographed warehouse operation with his own ramshackle, buggy code, slapped together under tremendous pressure with no help or review. Standard solutions like Shopify or WooCommerce couldnât cope with the load, and the businessâs razor-thin margins wouldnât support a larger tech team. As a result, there were ten copies of the product list, slightly out of sync with each other but all required for different purposes; special web pages labelled âdo not touchâ that repriced or deleted the entire catalogue when you opened them; and a âblack screenâ filled with tiny numbers Emanuil consulted throughout the day, mumbling to himself as he made critical adjustments to keep the teetering old tub afloat.
After many years of all-nighters and ugly shortcuts, the firm became profitable enough to bring in a team of professionals to stabilise the code. As the leader of the new crew, I took one look and told Emanuil heâd produced a pile of unstructured spaghetti. He replied, in his thick Bulgarian accent, âYou are right, Squirrel. My code, it is spaghetti.â Then he paused for a puff of his e-cigarette, and said, âBut it is nutritious spaghetti. All of you engineers, you have jobs because of my nutritious spaghetti!â
A CTO reminded me of Emanuilâs pasta pronouncement when she said last week that âif your software isnât moving forwards, itâs decaying and getting worse.â Sheâs right, but that doesnât mean we need to fix it! For one thing, consider companies that put their code on satellites and medical devices, where change is extremely expensive, or for an even starker example, my client whose silicon chips are baked into concrete pillars that hold up buildings and bridges. In these worlds, sky-high costs prohibit fixing all but the most critical of flaws, and when bugs emerge or needs change, itâs operational procedures or connected third-party systems that have to adjust.
But Emanuilâs Edict teaches us a different and more widely applicable lesson: reducing entropy and getting the code ârightâ may be possible, but it isnât always profitable. Think of totally-entrenched industry stalwarts like SAP or Excel or Salesforce, whose bugs and limitations live forever; for clients of mine that sell similar workhorse software, the smallest change to the golden goose is anathema and innovation is beyond the pale. Thatâs the stable, Complicated end of Cynefin, while in Emanuilâs startup world, deep in the Complex domain, it makes no sense to experiment with software when it isnât the source of uncertainty. Only once the company had got the business model and marketing right could the leadership even consider a tech investment; until then, the nutritive noodles kept the organisation alive to keep whizzing around the OODA loop, learning about what customers wanted to buy. I may preach daily releases and constant software improvement, but let Emanuilâs story remind us all that âbetterismâ is a false god: in many cases, chasing the Platonic ideal of your software can lead you straight off a cliff.
This first appeared in my weekly Insanely Profitable Tech Newsletter which is received as part of the Squirrel Squadron every Monday, and was originally posted on 15th July 2024. To get my provocative thoughts and tips direct to your inbox first, sign up here: https://squirrelsquadron.com
