Friends in high placesWilliam L. Livingston
Friends in high places
by William L. Livingston · first published 1990
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3HN commenters
2018–2025first – last mentioned
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See Livingston’s Have Fun At Work and Friends in High Places.
on “Ask HN: How do you solve big, complex problems?” ↗Look at the books "Have Fun at Work" and "Friends in High Places" by Livingston. The confusion you describe reflects the difficulty of getting everyone to pull in the same direction when you are trying to do something that is too complex for one person to do.
on “Ask HN: Are there jobs that let me code without top-heavy management?” ↗Livingston's Friends in High Places is a sequel to Have Fun at Work. I think it's a bit more positive in outlook but it has a chilling description of the scariest way high-tech projects go wrong... By approaching an asymptote. When your…
on “Ask HN: How do you solve big, complex problems?” ↗…approaching an asymptote (say 97% done) where you keep working harder and harder to get to 94%, 95%, 95.5% and never quite get there because of a structural inadequacy of your plan. Livingston's book "Friends in High Places" has the best account of this I've seen https://www.abebooks.com/9780937063064/Friends-High-Places-L...
on “Ask HN: Why do so many assume we’re on the cusp of super-intelligent AI?” ↗Out of curiosity, have you checked out these other works? Design for Prevention (2010) ISBN 978-0-937063-05-7 Friends in High Places (1990) ISBN 937063-06-1 Have Fun at Work (1988) ISBN 0-937063-05-3 The New Plague (1986) ISBN 0-937063-03-7 POSIWID is mentioned in the first three works; engineer William L. Livingston authored the…
on “Anyone can push updates to the doge.gov website” ↗The books are "Have Fun at Work" and "Friends in High Places," both by William L. Livingston
on “Every Good Regulator of a System Must Be a Model of That System (1970) [pdf]” ↗Related works that mention POSIWID, mostly by W.L. Livingston: The New Plague (1985) Have Fun at Work (1988) Friends in High Places (1990) Design for Prevention (Silva) Seeking further references.
on “The purpose of a system is what it does” ↗