Run Your Engineering Team Like a Hedge Fund
Embracing Asymmetric Risk What is the common economic theme between: Lockheed Skunk Works (1943) ( see my analysis here ) Netflix's Migration to AWS and AWS S3 Storage (later 2000s onward) High-Performance Software Engineering (my previous post) Embracing engineering as high-risk, high-return investment where risk is asymmetric, bad things can happen, and no less than exponential growth is expected! The key primary word is RISK ! The key secondary word is EMBRACE ! And therefore why I wrote that High-Performance Software Engineering is like "running your development like a hedge fund " Some history, three dimensions Let's start with the following claims: Google invented the foundational math and architectural blueprints (GFS, MapReduce, Borg) that made massive distributed computing possible. AWS commoditized that architecture, transforming physical hardware into infinitely scalable, programmable infrastructure . Netflix pioneered the operational c...