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Professional practice

Engineers & product builders

Trade-offs, failure modes, users, maintenance, simplicity, technical debt, and accountable sign-off.

12 questions, 143 answers on the record, from 118 members. Every question is asked in FLAPSS wording — nobody answers as anybody else.

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Worth reading

How has a setback or failure set you up for later success?

Frederick W. Smith

Founder and long-serving chairman of FedEx Corporation

I was a student at Yale and wrote a paper about the computerized society that was on the horizon. ... Then I sort of let that lie. I didn’t get a particularly good grade on it, as I recall.

Recorded · Academy of Achievement · 1998

Joan Didion

American writer

Yeah. It’s a grandiose reaction. You are claiming you could really control this, but you failed.

Recorded · Academy of Achievement · 2005

Amy Tan

Novelist; author of The Joy Luck Club

I didn’t fear failure. I expected failure. I think I’ve always been somebody, since the deaths of my father and brother, who was afraid to hope.

Recorded · Academy of Achievement · 1996

Read all 69 →

Every question in this questionnaire

  1. Describe a design trade-off where improving one important quality required knowingly making another worse. —
  2. What are you best at that nobody watching would notice? 26
  3. Which failure mode do outsiders underestimate because the system usually hides it? —
  4. When did observing real users overturn your idea of how a system should work? —
  5. How much should instinct count in big decisions? 4
  6. What did you remove or simplify that made the result substantially better? —
  7. What bad recommendations do people in your field repeat too often? 32
  8. What have you learned from maintaining something long after the excitement of building it passed? —
  9. How has a setback or failure set you up for later success? 69
  10. Which shortcut became a debt, and how did you decide whether to repay it? —
  11. When you put your name on something, how thoroughly should you have checked it first — and when have you signed off without checking enough? —
  12. Which problem are you still chipping away at? 12

Who has answered

Members with enough answers in this questionnaire to be worth arriving at — listed A–Z, not ranked by count.

  • Bill Clinton

    42nd President of the United States, 1993–2001

    2 answers United States b. 1946

  • Daniel Ek

    Co-founder and former chief executive of Spotify

    2 answers Sweden b. 1983

  • David Vélez

    Co-founder and chief executive of Nubank

    2 answers Colombia

  • Desmond Tutu

    Anglican Archbishop of Cape Town; chair of South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission; Nobel Peace Prize, 1984

    2 answers South Africa 1931–2021

  • Drew Houston

    Co-founder and chief executive of Dropbox

    2 answers United States b. 1983

  • Edmund Hillary

    Mountaineer and explorer; first ascent of Everest, 1953

    3 answers New Zealand 1919–2008

  • Elinor Ostrom

    Political economist; laureate of the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences, 2009

    2 answers United States 1933–2012

  • Jensen Huang

    Co-founder, president and chief executive of NVIDIA

    2 answers United States b. 1963

  • John Lewis

    U.S. Representative from Georgia, 1987–2020; Chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee 1963–1966

    3 answers United States 1940–2020

  • Magnus Carlsen

    Norwegian chess grandmaster; World Chess Champion 2013–2023

    2 answers Norway b. 1990

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