At X, Failure Is Not an Option: It's a Feature (Astro Teller's 2016 TED Talk) (backchannel.com)

New submitter Evan Hansen writes: Everyone likes to pays lip service to "fail fast," but when was the last time your boss gave you a bonus when your project was killed? In his 2016 TED Talk, concluded just moments ago, Astro Teller, the head of Alphabet's X R&D lab shares some never-before revealed stories of his team's failures and iterations, and explains how "fail fast" can be more than a trite cliche. The first X project was the self-driving car, and subsequent ones include Google Glass, Project Loon's Internet service via balloon, Makani energy kites, and a drone delivery service dubbed Project Wing.

Comments

It's good to be an elite

[DNS-and-BIND]

Man, it has got to be great being at the top. Where you can fail and nobody will fire you for it. In the rest of the world, when you are associated with a failed project, that puts you first in line the next time layoffs come around. That almost happened to me once, but luckily I smelled it coming and managed to distance myself from my friend who was in charge of the failing project. It broke up our friendship, but I still had a job afterwards and he didn't. So, you could say I "failed fast" in that I quickly determined that my friend had a failure face and I quickly failed to stick with him when times got tough.

But for some reason I was never invited to give a TED talk about it. I wonder why? Oh yeah, I'm a filthy prole, I forgot. Why did Astro Teller get to give a TED talk? Because he's the grandson of Edward Teller, the father of the hydrogen bomb. His father was a professor. Stanford couldn't admit him fast enough. He got into Google because Googlers distrust people who are not like themselves. He even gets away with a stupid-ass name like "Astro" where in the rest of the world a name like that will get you swirlies.

Re:It's good to be an elite

[JoeMerchant]

I'm fairly sure your friend's project wasn't a fail-fast investigation, but rather a sure thing development.

I think the best line in the talk was "shifting perspective is more powerful than being smart, if you're coming at an established problem from an established approach, you're competing with all the other smart people who came before you, and that's a terrible place to be competitively." So, what do they do? They try unusual approaches, they fail, they try again, they fail better next time, and most importantly: they identify when they fail to free up resources to try something else.

Yes, it's a deep pockets approach, a lot like Vulture Capital investing, but without the traditional conservative threats of hellfire and damnation when you fail - as most people do most of the time in this type of R&D. VCs praise serial success stories, just like Wall Street glorifies analysts who have gotten it right the past 3 consecutive years... most of these people fail to realize that luck plays into success more than skill - not that you don't need skill to succeed, but simply that luck is a better component.

In an organization like X, they'll have other methods to identify and reward skill besides successful productization of lunatic ideas. As they stressed in the article, identifying objective evidence of failure early in an approach is a valuable skill.

Re:It's good to be an elite

[DNS-and-BIND]

What I was saying flew right over your head, didn't it? All that education, and you never learned a thing.

Re:It's good to be an elite

[Swampash]

Man, it has got to be great being at the top. (snip)

Kudos to you DNS-and-BIND. Your comment is more insightful than the parent article.

Re:It's good to be an elite

[guruevi]

The problem with firing everyone that makes a mistake is that you create a culture that just goes with IBM/Microsoft/contractor because you can just shift the blame. You spend insane amounts of money without actually innovating or doing anything that progresses your company. In the end your company goes bust because it can't compete with entities that are more agile and are innovators in their market.

Re:It's good to be an elite

[HornWumpus]

And like most things, the sane answer is somewhere in the grey area.

Re:It's good to be an elite

[Anonymous Coward]

But for some reason I was never invited to give a TED talk about it. I wonder why? Oh yeah, I'm a filthy prole, I forgot.

Also really bitter, self-pitying, and unpleasant to listen to.

Re:It's good to be an elite

[JoeMerchant]

What I was saying flew right over your head, didn't it? All that education, and you never learned a thing.

Don't worry about it, the stuff they talk about at TED obviously doesn't apply in your life.

Re:It's good to be an elite

[JoeMerchant]

And like most things, the sane answer is somewhere in the grey area.

The sane answer is the boring answer - no risk no reward...

Of course, serious R&D, whether it's insane spoiled children in California today, or gentleman scientists at Bell Labs in the 1950s and 60s, basically requires a lot of input capital... many ideas will fail to prove their worth, and once in awhile you'll get something like the transistor.

Re:It's good to be an elite

[Anonymous Coward]

"I'm fairly sure your friend's project wasn't a fail-fast investigation, but rather a sure thing development."

Nice Marketing-Speak there.

"I think the best line in the talk was "shifting perspective is more powerful than being smart, if you're coming at an established problem from an established approach, you're competing with all the other smart people who came before you, and that's a terrible place to be competitively." So, what do they do? They try unusual approaches, they fail, they try again, they fail better next time, and most importantly: they identify when they fail to free up resources to try something else."

So being able to shift perspective is something smart people don't do?

"Yes, it's a deep pockets approach, a lot like Vulture Capital investing, but without the traditional conservative threats of hellfire and damnation when you fail - as most people do most of the time in this type of R&D. VCs praise serial success stories, just like Wall Street glorifies analysts who have gotten it right the past 3 consecutive years... most of these people fail to realize that luck plays into success more than skill - not that you don't need skill to succeed, but simply that luck is a better component."

We're comparing a game that can be empirically proved and is generally perceived as rigged (wall street) to what R&D does when they are approaching quantifiably difficult problems with effectively unlimited capital. Stop mixing Valium with Ritalin.

"In an organization like X, they'll have other methods to identify and reward skill besides successful productization of lunatic ideas. As they stressed in the article, identifying objective evidence of failure early in an approach is a valuable skill."

Actually Listening to your employee's when they point out the obvious is also a valuable skill, however when you are a megacorp with 10 layers of management, the Purple Monkey Dishwasher problem is an issue and nobody has time to talk to the proles. One might talk to someone who will rightly point out that the self driving car deal will not work because the sensors don't exist to provide proper 3 dimensional geographical information to the vehicle; then you need to splice that information together. Most of the systems we see today use GPS or RFID to determine reference points for a proper course, and Radar to attempt to avoid collisions. Try doing the reliability engineering on that one.

It's an obvious problem to anyone who has a cursory understanding of the problem who isn't being handed tons of dosh to chase impossible problems by companies that want to stay at the top of the news. If however you are trying to keep the proletariat placated, fairy tales can be effective.

For Awhile.

Obviously they've stopped working on Slashdotters, and we like making fun of your kind.

Poindexter, at least do us the favor of accepting your swirly with dignity.

Re:It's good to be an elite

[sexconker]

The stuff they talk about at TED doesn't apply to anyone's life. TED is hot air, fluff, and pie-in-the-sky bullshit. It's a fucking joke!

Re:It's good to be an elite

[shawn2772]

Man, it has got to be great being at the top. Where you can fail and nobody will fire you for it. In the rest of the world, when you are associated with a failed project, that puts you first in line the next time layoffs come around.

This depends on the nature of the project. If you're doing yet another ERP system integration, yes, you should succeed, and there should be negative consequences if you don't, because there is nothing new involved, just lots and lots of detail-oriented grunt work. It's hard, but good planning and careful attention to detail will get you to the end of the job, and if it doesn't, it's because you did a poor job, not because the job was not doable.

But when you're breaking new ground, trying to do things that have never been done before, if your management expects success, they're idiots. I grant that lots of companies are led by idiots, but that doesn't make them any less wrong. Google is where it is precisely because its leadership understands that failure is always possible, and the more audacious the goals the more likely it is that you'll fail. When you're pushing the envelope, true failure isn't when the project stumbles and falls due to some major technological obstacle. It's when you fail because of something you really could have foreseen... or when you fail to learn from your failure.

Google has a culture of post mortem analyses to ensure that that last sort of failure doesn't happen. Whenever anything goes seriously wrong, a detailed analysis of what went wrong, and when, and why, is conducted. Not with the goal of identifying people to blame, but to determine what lessons can be learned and what can be done to ensure that failure doesn't happen again. For someone who grew up outside of the Google culture, it's pretty terrifying to go through your first post mortem, for something you built. It's hard not to be defensive. After a few times, though, you begin to internalize the fact that unless the cause was you just not doing your job, you have nothing to worry about and may well come out with kudos or even a bonus.

He got into Google because Googlers distrust people who are not like themselves.

I got into Google as a 42-year old graduate of a podunk little four-year state school that no one has heard of, with an unaccredited CS program. I can't comment on whether I'm like the typical Googler, because I'm not sure what that is. Aside from the well-publicized issues around gender and race, which exist across nearly all tech companies, it's a very diverse place (note that race and gender diversity are important, but they're far from the only forms of diversity). The "Stanford MSCS" is well-represented, of course, but I work with one engineer who has only an associate degree and another who got his GED at age 29 and never attended college at all.

He even gets away with a stupid-ass name like "Astro" where in the rest of the world a name like that will get you swirlies.

Very true. All sorts of quirkiness is accepted and even embraced at Google. That's one of the things I most enjoy about working here.

Re:It's good to be an elite

[JoeMerchant]

So being able to shift perspective is something smart people don't do?

It's not about smart, it's about appetite for risk. Plenty of smart people work for big, successful, conservative companies. For the most part, they don't stay employed there by suggesting wild approaches to established problems. There are lots of creative people in the world, companies that embrace that creativity in an attempt to create new, disruptive and potentially highly valuable technologies are not as common.

Re: It's good to be an elite

[Anonymous Coward]

I think part of the OP's frustration is that when you have nearly unlimited funds to pursue concepts it can be hard to differentiate between the inertia of a successful idea and the mileage you're getting just by pouring funds into something.

I'd be more interested in hearing a TED talk from a scrappy team that was successful with self or minimal funding. The information would certainly be applicable to a larger subset of teams.

Re:It's good to be an elite

[Anonymous Coward]

He got into Google because Googlers distrust people who are not like themselves. He even gets away with a stupid-ass name like "Astro" where in the rest of the world a name like that will get you swirlies.

Shit, and I thought I was bitter, stuck working for the part of Google where they expect your projects to be successful. I have to hand it to you; on a scale of zero to denatonium, you're at least a strychnine.

Re:It's good to be an elite

[Ol Olsoc]

The stuff they talk about at TED doesn't apply to anyone's life. TED is hot air, fluff, and pie-in-the-sky bullshit. It's a fucking joke!

My favorite TED talk

: https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

The talk itself is some self indulgent stuff about how she came to believe that there is a God. But irony abounds!

http://gawker.com/professional...

This new reformed woman had a bit of a road rage incident, followed a 73 year old woman home, ran over her with her car, then started to back up to run over her again but fortunately was stopped.

I haven't looked at TED talks the same way ever since .

Re: It's good to be an elite

[Anonymous Coward]

Changing ones perpective is not a given. Most successful people give talks because of having endured enough morons to finally find some gold nuggets, or because teaching is easier than doing. Components: networking, stamina and luck, given enough skill.

If you think you know it all you lost.

Re:It's good to be an elite

[Anonymous Coward]

This is amazing. Great video. When you know that she's a multiple attempted murder, both before and since, this is the most amazing video to watch.

Re: It's good to be an elite

[Anonymous Coward]

Anything is possible given a specifically smart group of people to a task. As long as everything entails profit, failure is a given. You can't fire that. Blame eh, that's an idiot game.

Re:It's good to be an elite

[Anonymous Coward]

What you've got there is a TEDx talk, not an actual TED talk.

TED talks tend to feature experts in their fields, giving real insight on a topic of interest.

TEDx is any old Learning Annex crap with a TED logo plastered on it (i.e. hot air, fluff, pie-in-the-sky bullshit).

Re: It's good to be an elite

[Anonymous Coward]

She was only defending herself from a covert assassin. Fail Fast! She's a pro.

Re:It's good to be an elite

[yes-but-no]

, true failure isn't when the project stumbles and falls due to some major technological obstacle. It's when you fail because of something you really could have foreseen... or when you fail to learn from your failure.

While it's true to see it from failure perspective, the real benefit of the new approach is you may find a hidden new efficient path which no one before you saw. It's like how columbus went west to reach India; You never know what treasure you may arrive at because you are moving in a totally unknown path. The rewards may be staggering. I see moving into the unknown is the key here -- trusting your gut.

Re:It's good to be an elite

[yes-but-no]

They try unusual approaches, they fail, they try again, they fail better next time, and most importantly: they identify when they fail to free up resources to try something else.

The skill that smells failure early is the same one that smells a distant success. That is you have the vision/intuition/awareness to see things which are not in the visible range of others.
A less aware person will keep working on xyz even after it is exhibiting signs of failure...his read-resolution of failure is low; Thus as you train yourself to spot failure early; you also gain to see that unusual smell of success from a vast distance -- like how a shark knows the presence of an injured prey from a few drops of blood miles away.

Re:It's good to be an elite

[swb]

This depends on the nature of the project. If you're doing yet another ERP system integration, yes, you should succeed, and there should be negative consequences if you don't, because there is nothing new involved, just lots and lots of detail-oriented grunt work. It's hard, but good planning and careful attention to detail will get you to the end of the job, and if it doesn't, it's because you did a poor job, not because the job was not doable.

Who's the "you" in this? Any computer system project that is sufficiently embedded in business process has failure modes so far outside the reach of anyone on the technical side that blaming technical people for it is incredibly myopic. They often end up failing even when the technology works right.

And almost all of this is beyond the reach any single individual who's not a senior manager and then there are still conceptual problems with where blame ought to be assigned. And once you get into "you" as a team/group, often with differentiated roles and responsibilities, where failure modes can vary widely.

I work for a small IT consultancy and I work on projects where all kinds of problems crop up. Most don't cause the project to "fail" (even when they go badly, I think there are various organizational and individual reasons for resisting declaring failure) but even when I'm the sole implementer of the project, there are failure reasons that go beyond me. Poor scoping. Client interference. Unrealistic timelines. Inadequate resources. The list is long and full of things I had no control over.

Re:It's good to be an elite

[Anonymous Coward]

Being forced to "fail fast" isn't being an elite. It's yet another way to say "produce results quickly or risk getting fired". 60 years ago, companies ran research divisions, where true research was done. Most of it failed, but not all of it, and not all if it failed as quickly as somebody focused on a quick profit likes.

Re:It's good to be an elite

[Gr8Apes]

The skill that smells failure early is the same one that smells a distant success.

Hate to break it to you, but the ability to smell shit no way relates to being able to smell roses. Some people just can't smell the roses.

Re:It's good to be an elite

[The Wild Norseman]

I knew before I even clicked the link, but you're referring to TEDx talks and not TED talks. Yes, there is a difference and it's huge. It's pretty much a guarantee that any woowoo shit will be a TEDx (the 'x' is probably for 'x'-tra crazay).

Re:It's good to be an elite

[yes-but-no]

depends if the shit is 10 km away or 1 feet away. It doesn't need keen awareness to do the latter. Basically you can't go to the left too much without swinging the other side - ying n yang of existence.

Re:It's good to be an elite

[justthinkit]

Well said, and I learned a word for the day.

Re:It's good to be an elite

[bigpat]

I'd say that failure of business systems projects are pretty common and largely the result of either:

1) business people (project managers, analysts, middle management) that don't think about time or money and are dead set to make people adhere to arbitrary "requirements" that should have been cut as soon as someone said it would take more than 30 seconds to do or they never even asked and assumed it would take 30 seconds to do because they lack experience to know.

and/or

2) IT people that will give the business as much rope as they want to hang themselves with without pushing back because they are either working by billable hours or are used to working billable hours and are more than willing to let project costs and timelines spiral out of control because that is what puts the meals on the table and they can just blame the project management and requirements when management suddenly decides they would have rather have a project succeed than get every requirement implemented.

Re:It's good to be an elite

[Anonymous Coward]

I think you're missing the point. There is a difference between personal fail and project fail. For instance, if an idea is good but it is underfunded and requirements are caught in a political fight between to VP's (or SES's for US Govt folks), while the upper management is permanently in damage control mode, then if the project team says "it's screwed and stop wasting your money here" then they should be giving a little something for calling a spade a spade so everyone can move on. Currently, many projects best described as the above drag on because funding is life and no one wants the funding to go away, regardless of the possibility of success. The end result is exponentially more cost (from everyone) with no greater result that what was to be had. Another reason the project team does this because a failed project looks bad on the people involved, and dragging it out gives people time to jump ship or get promoted (then jump ship). Removing this stigma when it's not a peon's fault is A Good Thing in minimizing this behavior.

I imagine this is what the TED talk speaks to. If a project fails because of internal factors, then I would agree with what you said.

Re:It's good to be an elite

[moorley]

Woohoo!

Well said!

Nice to know I am not the only insightful cynic...

We live in interesting times...

Re:It's good to be an elite

[penguinoid]

She believes God put her on this earth to rid us of annoying drivers?

Re:It's good to be an elite

[swb]

IT people that will give the business as much rope as they want to hang themselves with without pushing back because they are either working by billable hours or are used to working billable hours and are more than willing to let project costs and timelines spiral out of control because that is what puts the meals on the table and they can just blame the project management and requirements when management suddenly decides they would have rather have a project succeed than get every requirement implemented.

This may be a practice that "big consulting" can get away with, but almost never is it something you can get away with in the SMB sphere. Any project that accrues change orders resulting in cost increases of more than about 10% gets turned into a big pissing match and often resulting in a compromises that make nobody really happy.

I've seen squabbles over $300 worth of travel to get someone on site to fix a problem or 2-3 hours of time.

Nobody wins when projects spiral like this; I've actually seen more "damage" done preventing them for spiraling then letting them spiral.

Re:It's good to be an elite

[Anonymous Coward]

You just needed a cow metaphor.

Re:It's good to be an elite

[bigpat]

Oh I've seen consultants milk contracts and rolling requirements specification for tens of thousands of dollars and months of work in a midsize company.

Yes, small businesses are usually much much tighter with money and I've seen them have the opposite problem where if you have to justify every expense with the real cost that things simply don't get done that should get done.

Re:It's good to be an elite

[shawn2772]

This depends on the nature of the project. If you're doing yet another ERP system integration, yes, you should succeed, and there should be negative consequences if you don't, because there is nothing new involved, just lots and lots of detail-oriented grunt work. It's hard, but good planning and careful attention to detail will get you to the end of the job, and if it doesn't, it's because you did a poor job, not because the job was not doable.

Who's the "you" in this? Any computer system project that is sufficiently embedded in business process has failure modes so far outside the reach of anyone on the technical side that blaming technical people for it is incredibly myopic. They often end up failing even when the technology works right.

Yes, the "you" in my statement encompasses the relevant business organizations as well as technology. The entirety of the project, not just the technical people. This applies throughout the remainder of my post as well.

Re:It's good to be an elite

[swb]

Maybe I'm just lucky (or unlucky, although I'd make no more money personally) that I've never seen this happen, and certainly never deliberately.

The only thing that seems to come close are projects that get strung out over time due to customer cancellations of cutover dates or other scheduling complexities. This just kills project efficiency.

Scoping problems happen, too, where some kind of details are missed or problems that don't turn up until you start an upgrade but usually these get dealt with pretty openly through change orders. We rarely miss key details if given access for proper scoping, but occasionally we don't get access but we build that into the project.

The bottom line, though, is that nobody seems to win when project costs spiral. The customer often has a pretty fixed budget or has to explain any significant cost overruns internally.

Now, I mostly also just deal with infrastructure projects, so the project scopes are pretty limited and well defined. Software development projects seem to be the kind of thing that ends up running on forever with no end in sight.

Re:It's good to be an elite

[bigpat]

Yes, software projects are notorious for this scoping issue. Think healthcare.gov. Without ascribing even any milking motive... it is simply very hard to conceptualize what it might take to build out some software systems. If you conceive a simple button on a screen, it may take a few seconds to place the button there but then it has to do something when you press it.

People often think in terms of UI for scoping purposes. But think about the data, and back end processing that needs to happen. It is sometimes just hard to conceptualize and scope.

Google is a good example. It's primary UI is a text input and a button and then think about what is behind that and how many iterations of software processing and data collection underpin the functionality.

Re:It's good to be an elite

[swb]

The parent article I originally responded to was describing ERP rollouts or something "well known", so those might also fit the endless spiral definition because any project with sufficient business process penetration is likely to have a broad set of stakeholders (bordering on infinite if you take customers into account) and nearly impossible to scope second-order and beyond consequences.

Now that we've exchanged these messages and I've thought about it, one reason (besides project type) why I can see some of these things spiraling (beyond borderline fraudulent vendor behavior) is that there's almost a prisoner's dilemma trap of circumstances that prevents anyone from stopping.

The vendor can't realistically stop billing and keep working, the client has a sunk cost problem (in addition to even a real need for the finished project), and often there's so many stakeholders and decision makers that stopping the project is a major political problem.

It actually becomes easier to keep spending money on a cancerous project than it is to kill it.

fail fast, please

[turkeydance]

so we can move on and leave you behind.

Google Glass?

[93 Escort Wagon]

The inventor of Google Glass either left Google or was asked to leave. But, in either case, I don't see how that fits this narrative.

Re:Google Glass?

[Anonymous Coward]

Probably for being a Glasshole.

Re:Google Glass?

[JoeMerchant]

The inventor of Google Glass either left Google or was asked to leave. But, in either case, I don't see how that fits this narrative.

Sounds like he might not have been a good fit for the fail and try again culture.

Re:Google Glass?

[jphamlore]

Google brought in a marketer who worked at "Calvin Klein, Swatch, Coach, The Gap, Old Navy," etc. And now I think Tony Fadell is now at the top of the project's leadership.

Re:Google Glass?

[JoeMerchant]

Google brought in a marketer who worked at "Calvin Klein, Swatch, Coach, The Gap, Old Navy," etc. And now I think Tony Fadell is now at the top of the project's leadership.

That fits with the biggest criticism of Google Glass $1500 edition.

Re:Google Glass?

[Anonymous Coward]

Should have seen it coming!

Re:Google Glass?

[mrchaotica]

The inventor of Google Glass is a Georgia Tech professor who I assume only showed up at Google because they wanted to make a product out of his research. Why should he keep hanging out there after the project is done when he could be in the Caribbean figuring out how to talk with dolphins instead? (Yes, that is actually what he's researching now.)

Couple things or more...

[Anonymous Coward]

Ted..... cultish overrated fraud of bonanza of overrated boring ramblings from narcissists.
Google X... Not alphabet, Google. Alphabet is what professional content outlets have to call them. Google is what they are. Google, you were once lean and favorable. Then you went thru your "Wait Facebook, me tooo" phase. You've killed so many of your good products. You're now bloated and kinda out of touch. You've created a lot of dumb failures. You overhype and you oversell, often beckoning the tides of failure to come sweep away your chances of success of whatever your latest "moonshot" is.
Evan Hansen, do you actually have an account on this site?
Timothy You don't even try anymore.

pro gears?

[Anonymous Coward]

no way so. eww man. no then. clear no. no no no.

Start selling!

[__aaclcg7560]

Fail fast works better for sales calls. Talk to as many people as possible to overcome the fear, doubts and frustrations about selling. The faster you fail at selling, the more likely to get a sale.

Re:Start selling!

[JoeMerchant]

Fail fast works better for sales calls. Talk to as many people as possible to overcome the fear, doubts and frustrations about selling. The faster you fail at selling, the more likely to get a sale.

Absolutely true, and it's the same kind of personality test: you've got to be resilient. There are different ways of getting that resilience, a common one in sales is magical or delusional thinking - which would be a not so great fit for product development engineering, but in sales the key is never giving up - believing in your product, and transferring that enthusiasm into your mark (potential customer's) mind. That and incessantly reminding them about the "opportunity to purchase."

I worked for a much less well funded "idea house" in the 1990s, we developed a couple of concepts from scratch into products, and the times we failed fast and followed up with better approaches were key to our progress. We also had several years of stagnation, where we tied into "reliable contracts" that guaranteed us work and income - not nearly as exciting when you look back on those years, but it did keep the lights on.

I take it a step further

[damn_registrars]

For my work, failure is not an option, it comes standard! I wish I was compensated for all the failure and destruction I have left in my wake. That said, the most dramatic failure that followed me I cannot take credit for (I worked for CompUSA a few years before they went belly-up) but plenty of less spectacular failures can be tied to me and I never got bonuses for them.

Re:I take it a step further

[sexconker]

I made a mistake that got 17 people killed, and I got a promotion!

-Future Google Autonomous Car "Engineer"

Re:I take it a step further

[Anonymous Coward]

For my work, failure is not an option, it comes standard! I wish I was compensated for all the failure and destruction I have left in my wake. That said, the most dramatic failure that followed me I cannot take credit for (I worked for CompUSA a few years before they went belly-up) but plenty of less spectacular failures can be tied to me and I never got bonuses for them.

You should have gone into banking.

Re: I take it a step further

[Anonymous Coward]

Still better than the Pinto.

Re: I take it a step further

[Anonymous Coward]

Is it? How many people actually died because of the placement of the fuel tank?

Re: I take it a step further

[Anonymous Coward]

27 deaths were attributed to Pinto fires.

C'mon, it's like you're not even trying!

The fastest failure

[penguinoid]

The fastest failure, is when you don't even start. And no, you're not getting a bonus for that either.

Re:The fastest failure

[bigpat]

The fastest failure, is when you don't even start. And no, you're not getting a bonus for that either.

Well, assuming you don't just say no to every risky idea and are adding value to the decision chain by approving projects that are more likely to succeed then yes I think you would eventually be getting a bonus based on success of some of those projects. Or if you are not a decision maker then at least you can inform your management about a dead end and then hopefully get reassigned to something you can succeed at doing.

Overall, I think the real test is whether you can document the unknowns and document that they are actually unknowns to everyone in the industry and then get a result that can better inform future decision making in that area by narrowing down the unknowns.

You want iterative trial and error informed by the previous iteration, not just dumb trial and error in a vacuum.

Another way of saying

[ceoyoyo]

Fail fast is another way of saying "spot a dumb idea before you've spent a lot of time and treasure, and kill it before it spreads." Unfortunately the MBA types thought it was a business strategy.

AtX, Failure Is Not an Option

[mentil]

My ATX mobos fail regularly, I dunno what they're talking about.

Everyone likes to pays

[Anonymous Coward]

Everyone likes to pays Swedish Chef for his English lesson yeah sir and them does real good job.

Because investors

[Anonymous Coward]

LOVE to give money to people with a track record of building failures.

Failure - a learning experience

[colinwb]

The British economics commentator Hamish McRae once wrote about a bright young executive put in charge of a project which subsequently failed: he tried to resign but was told by a superior that he had just been through an expensive training course in what not to do, and that if he thought that he could leave and take that knowledge to a competitor he had better think again.

Re: Failure - a learning experience

[Anonymous Coward]

And right there is the crux. Business, unlike actual scientific advancement is purely a competetive sport at money making. Google actually pretends to span both. Slow fail.

Re:Failure - a learning experience

[110010001000]

That is dumb advice. He didn't learn "what not to do" because there are infinite ways for a project to fail. You can fail at everything and it won't make your next project any more likely to be successful.

Failure is important in any research

[Theovon]

Even the smartest researchers will have some trouble imagining the end results of their ideas far in the future. You have to experiment. You can try to guess which ideas are the best, but then you have to try them out. Many will fail. The whole point in “fail fast” is to do feasibility experiments up front to eliminate the bad ideas as fast as possible so you can move on to the next one. If you’re any good, you’ll have some success rate — 10% would be good.

Even in academia, there’s a massive amount of rejection in peer-review venues. In fact, when you’re accepted at a venue whose acceptance rate is 20%, you state that with pride. While it’s true that most researchers don’t let many ideas completely die, what happens is that papers evolve with each rejection, getting better. It’s been shown that papers that are rejected at least once are typically of superior quality when they do get accepted. So even though you think that it’s great that your paper was accepted on the third try, it’s really not the same one you submitted the first time. So your real acceptance rate is low. It’s too bad peer review is so slow.

2 years is fast failing

[Anonymous Coward]

Really, what does it mean to fail fast? 2 days, 2 years, 10yrs?

This is all a marketing spin--mainly to impress investors since they are wondering why G has billions in their coffers and minimal profit.

The best R&D is calculating risks and failures. And yes, keep the best folks on failed projects, the best business folks on high business risk, the best technical folks on high technical risk--the domain knowledge is worth gold. Again, it's about the domain knowledge, not the education.

I ruv roo Rastro

[Anonymous Coward]

Signed,

Rosie