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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

Which problem are you still chipping away at?

David Vélez

Co-founder and chief executive of Nubank

Recorded · Fortune · 2023

I think a lot of that first wave of entrepreneurship was missing the product of localization, and they weren't really asking the question, "What are the big, impactful products or problems…
Tom Lubbock

Art critic

Recorded · The Observer · 2010

The mystery of summoning up words. Where are they in the mind, in the brain? They appear to be an agency from nowhere. They exist somewhere in our ground or in our air.
Edmund Hillary

Mountaineer and explorer; first ascent of Everest, 1953

Recorded · Academy of Achievement

I think most of our major challenges are not going to be in the physical field at all.
Read all 12 →

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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