Good Systems Run Themselves

When large teams of people are tasked with maintaining what should be a simple project, there is a large degree of inefficiency. These scenarios can be referred to as “brute force development”. Rather than be clever with the resources available, you force an outcome with an abundance of capital. This is similar to “brute force algorithms”¹ in that you’re targetting every single eventuality rather than reducing the focus and only targetting what’s immediately important and economical. The problem with this approach is that, as the development effort scales, the cost of development scales along with it. And keep in mind that this strategy already requires a high up-front cost. If the return on that investment outweighs the initial investment, then this approach appears to work, and that’s part of the problem.

There is a principal called The Matthew Principal² that follows from Matthew 25:29:

“For to everyone who has will more be given, and he will have an abundance. But from the one who has not, even what he has will be taken away.”

― Jesus, Matthew 25:29

A more practical correlary to this principal is Price’s Law³ in which, on any given team, the square root of contributors tend to provide 50% of the resulting value. This same effect exists in software development, and I’ve personally seen it in action.

This is all well and good, but what happens when the capital allocation no longer matches the people that produce the most value? As a project grows in complexity, it requires an increasing number of developers to maintain. The more developers that get added to maintain the project, the fewer developers actually contribute enough value to the project to justify their salary. For these people, it’s not actual value that justifies their employment, it’s politics.

For someone like me who just wants to complete their work and provide value to their community, the injection of politics ruins the experience. It’s always the diligent workers that start leaving the company, and the ones who must resort to politics to get ahead are the ones that remain. Price’s Law still applies in this scenario, but your pool of talent shrinks, and with it, the resulting value as well. In effect, driving out these high performers brings a new crop of “talent” into that position, but the end result is that less gets done - much less - requiring more developers to fill the vacuum.

So, how should a system be run? Every project should be split up into self-sustaining entities. These entities largely map to what we’d consider “communities” in the real world. The community itself is made up of its own smaller entities actively working to maintain itself. You can think of the human body being made up of specialized cells. Each of those cells contains similar pieces to other specialized cells but with a different singular purpose. For any community to function and grow, it needs a uniformity of purpose - within a few degrees anyway. This purpose will provide a clear vision for improvement.

If your community is the development of a WordPress plugin, you have a very narrow band of purpose. Every contributor to that effort wants it to perform well as it has a direct effect on their wellbeing in that they’re currently using it for their own devices. In effect, this plugin operates autonomously as it must because it fits into many different WordPress instances - all with their own stake in its continued operation.

Each of these WordPress instances produce their own value via content and are compensated for it. They can then pass their compensation down the stack either by contributing to the project with their efforts or by contributing to it monetarily. The current system doesn’t always function in this way, but it could and should as this approach to capital allocation follows our own biology in that we feel like that’s how it should be allocated.

One of my more recent reads is “The Righteous Mind”⁴ by Jonathan Haidt. In it, Jonathan weaves a narrative, peppered with psychology research, outlining the idea that human beings don’t act rationally. Rather, they act via intuition then use rationalization to post-hoc justify their actions. However, in WEIRD (Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic) cultures, people are conditioned through education to value rationalizations rather than intuitions and act on those. In this way, the self-enforced rationalization becomes a sort-of quasi intuition. This function is obviously backwards.

The research shows that it’s the intuition that has value as it comes from personal experience, but as a society, we’ve decided to put our value in the rationalization fed to us by whatever “authoritative” source we adhere to. If this rationalization follows our personal intutions, there’s not a problem here. Even if it diverges slightly from what we know, there’s a chance that you can “test out” that deviation to see if the standard approach is better in some way. But if that rationalization diverges significantly from reality, then we quickly have a problem as everybody who’s ignoring their intuition and, instead, follows a non-intuitive rationalization is causing long-term damage. If enough people are moving in this direction in a democratic society, they can impose their will and destroy what is actually valuable - leading to the society’s downfall.

In my estimation, in a healthy system, each community acts in its own self-interest and tries to provide as much real-world value as it can in order to survive. Each of these communities can compete or trade with other like or complementary communities. And the end result is a well-functioning system that runs itself. It’s the artificial rather than the organic application of capital that destroys this system. This overarcing “rationalization” blurs the unification of purpose and destroys the actual foundation of value for which we as people yearn.