@nat My own intro to results-oriented thinking came from poker, rather than M:tG, which I think is both a game that more people know, as well as an even more stark demonstration of the importance of that type of thinking. (IIRC, it was perhaps Phil Gordon’s Little Green Book, but the date on that seems wrong, since I thought I was introduced to this earlier than 2005.)

@nat Although an interesting twist on this topic at Labs is the swing towards “outcome > output” mantra that became predominant there, which I had never been very happy with for similar reasons as results- vs. process-oriented thinking. Too many outcomes weren’t ones that the team necessarily had control over, and I find it distasteful to measure against goals of that nature.

@alpha @nat One thing I’ve always struggled with is, does xp actually help? I know I produce better quality code which solves genuine business problems faster when I and my team use xp practices, and we’re happier doing it, but I get the feeling it’s such a small influence in the ultimate success of the business, however you measure that.

@ratkins @alpha Funnily enough this post was a replacement for a longer and weirder post about how people reason about software methodology based on equity price movements, which produces all kinds of weird results because of how many other factors there are in equity prices.

@ratkins @alpha I got kind of hung up on figuring out how much the VMware acquisition was just a direct result of a single analyst and the way he framed a single guidance cut.

Like it is *possible* that the acquisition mostly happened because of this one guy, which would be incredible if true, but I need to do more research, and what his up to now is too good to publish the rest of it without including that detail.

https://www.cnbc.com/video/2024/06/21/tesla-is-the-most-undervalued-ai-play-in-the-market-says-wedbushs-dan-ives.html

@ratkins @alpha Anyway my current take is that "doing XP" is mostly orthogonal to business success and that's fine, we should do it anyway.

"Making things well" is inherently valuable and XP lets us make things well without trading off time.

@nat @ratkins My somewhat nihilistic take is that there’s so much not under your control wrt. business success that you may as well a) do what you can to improve those odds and b) make as much enjoyment out of it as you can.

@alpha @nat I basically agree with you but my god that’s frustrating.

@nat @alpha Looking forward to reading *that* post…