Impact, agency, and taste

Ben Kuhn · 19 Apr 2025 · benkuhn.net ↗

3 korrents from this piece

Ben Kuhn did not write this page.

Every claim below was made in this piece, quoted word for word and numbered in the order the piece makes them, so you can read it there rather than take our word for it. The sentence above each quote is our reading of the claim, not their wording. Each quote was checked against a stored copy of the page at build time; where the two differ, the quote is the fact.

Our reading
Most software rewrites fail and take longer than people expect them to.

Their wordsmost rewrites fail and most people are over-optimistic about how long they will take
Our reading
People who can reliably make outcomes happen without oversight are rare and are the real bottleneck on how much an organization can take on at once.

Their wordsPeople who can be trusted to make something inevitable are really rare, and are typically the bottleneck for how many different things a team or company can do at once.
Our reading
Different people's areas of strongest judgment or taste rarely overlap much with each other.

Their wordsit's quite rare for different people's "zone of best taste" to overlap very much.