- Tags:: 🗞️Articles, My management principles, values, and practices
- Author:: Jeff Atwood (co-founder of Stack Overflow)
- Link:: Commandos, Infantry, and Police
- Source date:: 2004-06-29
- Finished date:: 2020-12-11
This idea comes from Accidental Empires book Robert X. Cringely (1993), and it’s about a company needing three types of people along its lifetime:
[Commandos] They work hard, fast, and cheap, though often with a low level of professionalism, which is okay, too, because professionalism is expensive. Their job is to do lots of damage with surprise and teamwork, establishing a beachhead before the enemy is even aware that they exist.
Are commandos the same than the ones in ✍️ Ask HN. How bad should the code be in a startup.?
[Infrantry] take the prototype, test it, refine it, make it manufacturable, write the manuals, market it, and ideally produce a profit. Because there are so many more of these soldiers and their duties are so varied, they require an infrastructure of rules and procedures for getting things done – all the stuff that commandos hate. [Police] These third-wave troops hate change. They aren’t troops at all but police. They want to fuel growth not by planning more invasions and landing on more beaches but by adding people and building economies and empires of scale.