There’s a group at work that has found me recently. They have ideas on how to optimize some things. They have simulations and Poisson models and charts and graphs. And they have a passion for solving the problem they’re faced with.
But it is an easy problem in the lab and not so easy a problem in the real world. In the real world, from their software, people expect a certain reliability. Some consistency. Not some sexy algorithm that is “under the covers” doing the “smart thing” for you. Because every now and then, the “smart thing” won’t be so smart. On average, it could be smarter than the dumb reliable thing, but every now and then it’s dumber than the methodical, steady approach. And if the user ever catches the algorithm behaving poorly, trust is lost. And once you lose a little trust, and then a little more, you eventually have lost too much.
But for researchy types, that’s not so bad. You can rationalize it and such so that the pros outweigh the cons. They can confidently say, too much trust will never be lost.
Though for me, it’s easy to tell that we’ll never try their algorithm. Mainly because of the trust factor, but also because of the development time. I’d rather spend it doing something else that has bigger potential gains. You should have seen their faces when we did the math on the charts they were presenting me. They were showing me big savings of this and that and it sounds really good. They should have sold me a car at the same time. Why wouldn’t you want these types of huge savings. Until you divided by the hours in a day and then calculated how much the average user would save in a day. Less than a handful of opportunities to optimize. Not going to spend our time on it. Much easier to just give the user more choices about how they want to control it…except…that’s also usually a waste of time. Always give them fewer bullets to shoot themself with.
So then, it is just a matter of how kindly I let them down. I remember being a researchy type. I remember what it’s like to care about something so much I couldn’t see how wrong I was. So I’m trying to let them down nicely.
I did feel bad about crushing their ideas.
And I did feel bad about enjoying crushing their ideas too. It was fun.
Now though, now that I’m thinking through some intern projects that are a touch researchy, I’m getting excited about it, and I can feel that swell of energy and emotion that comes from thinking about a “good idea”.
But I catch myself too…and wonder who’s going to enjoy crushing my dream.