My Little List of Useful Principles

This first appeared on my web page, but I thought it deserved to be repeated here on my blog. 

The David Stone Principle

“Never ask a question that has an answer you may not like.” Also expressed as “It is easier to obtain forgiveness than permission”. In other words, don’t ask if it is OK to do something, because the chances are there will be someone who will have some reason why you shouldn’t, and having asked the question (and got an answer you don’t like), you have placed yourself under an obligation to do something about the answer. Whereas if you just got on and did it, you could deal with any objections afterwards. This has two advantages. First, you’ve already done what you intended, and it is pretty unlikely that you will be made to undo it. Second, people are less likely to object after the fact anyway.

Harper’s Theory of Socks

Everybody who has ever packed a suitcase knows that no matter how full the suitcase, no matter how difficult it is to close, there is always some crevice where you can squeeze in one more pair of socks. Those familiar with the Principle of Mathematical Induction will immediately see that it follows that you can put an infinite number of pairs of socks in a single suitcase.

If this is obviously fallacious, it is less obvious why. But in any case it is a useful riposte to the executive or marketing person who wants to add just this one tiny extra piece of work to a project.

Law of Ambushes

I heard this one from Tony Lauck, but he claims to have got it from someone else. Think of an old-fashioned Western, with the good guys riding up towards the pass. They know the bad guys are up there somewhere, and they’re looking every step of the way, scanning the hilltops, watching for any movement, peering around twists and turns in the trail. Suddenly there’s a dramatic chord and the bad guys appear from nowhere, guns blazing. Of course the good guys triumph, except the one you already figured was only there to get shot, but the point is, ambushes happen and take you by surprise even though you expect them, even though you’re waiting for them every second. And they always come from where you weren’t expecting and weren’t watching.

The Lauck Principle of Protocol Design

This one is a little technical, but it is so fundamentally important to the small number of people who can benefit from it, that I include it anyway. Communication protocols (such as TCP) work by exchanging information that allows the two, or more, involved parties to influence each others’ operation. When designing a protocol, you have to decide what information to put in the messages. It is tempting to design messages of the form “Please do such and such” or “I just did so and so”. The problem here is that the interpretation of such messages generally ends up depending on the receiver having an internal model of its partner’s state. And it is very, very easy for this internal model to end up being subtly wrong or mis-synchronised (see the Law of Ambushes). The only way to build even moderately complex protocols that work is for the messages to contain only information about the internal state of the protocol machine. For example, not “please send me another message”, but “I have received all messages up to and including number 11, and I have space for one more message”. There are legitimate exceptions to this rule, for example where one protocol machine has to be kept very simple and the other is necessarily very complex, but they are rare and exceptional. As soon as both machines are even moderately complex, this principle must be followed slavishly.

The Lauck Principle of Building Things That Work

If you don’t understand what happens in every last corner case, every last combination of improbable states and improbable events, then it doesn’t work. Period. Yes, you may say, but it is too complex to understand all of these things right now. We will figure them out later as we build it. In this case, you are doomed. Not only does it not work, but it will never work.

The Jac Simensen Principle of Successful Management

Get the right people doing the things they’re good at, and then let them get on with it. It sounds simple, but it is rarely done thoroughly in practice. It's applicable to all levels of management but especially at more senior levels where there’s a lot of diversity in the tasks to be undertaken.

The Principle of Running Successful Meetings

Write the minutes beforehand. If you don’t know what outcome you’re trying to achieve, you stand little chance of getting there.

Harper’s Principle of Multiprocessor Systems

Building multiprocessor systems that scale while correctly synchronising the use of shared resources is very tricky, Whence the principle: with careful design and attention to detail, an n-processor system can be made to perform nearly as well as a single-processor system. (Not nearly n times better, nearly as good in total performance as you were getting from a single processor). You have to be very good – and have the right problem with the right decomposability – to do better than this.

Harper’s Principle of Scaling

As CPU performance increases by a factor of n, user-perceived software performance increases by about the square root of n. (The rest is used up by software bloat, fancier user interface and graphics, etc).

The Delmasso Exclamation Mark Principle

The higher you go in the structure of an organisation, the more exclamation marks are implicitly attached to everything you say or write. So when a junior person says something, people evaluate the statement on its merits. When the VP says it (even in organisations and cultures that aren’t great respecters of hierarchy and status, like software engineering), everyone takes it much more seriously. It means that as you move up the organisation, you have to be increasingly careful about what you say, and especially you have to be increasingly moderate (which doesn’t always come naturally!).

The Dog-House Principle

A dog-house is only big enough for one dog. So if you don’t want to be in the dog-house, make sure somebody else is. I first heard this applied to family situations (specifically to someone’s relationship with his mother-in-law) but it seems more generally applicable.

Mick's Principle of Centrally Managed Economies

There are three reasons why centrally managed economies don’t work. The first is obvious, the second less so, and the third not obvious at all. This principle was formulated by a friend of mine during the dying days of the Soviet Union. Its applicability to centrally-managed economy is obvious, but it should be borne in mind whenever an organization’s success model involves the slightest degree of central planning.

The first problem is that they assume a wise central authority that, given the correct facts, can figure out the right course of action for the next Five Year Plan. It is fairly obvious that such wisdom is unlikely to be found in practice.

The second problem is that even if such a collection of wisdom did exist, it would only succeed if given the correct input. In the case of the Soviet Union, this means the state of production in thousands of factories, mines and so on, as well as the needs in thousands of towns and villages. But all of this input will be distorted at every point.

The lowliest shopfloor supervisor will want to make things look better than they are, while the village mayor will make things look worse so as to get more for his village. And at every step up the chain of management, the information will be distorted to suit someone’s personal or organizational agenda. By the time the Central Planning Committee gets the information about what is supposedly going on, it has been distorted to the point where it is valueless.

The third problem is the least obvious. Suppose that by some miracle an infinitely wise central committee could be found, and that by another miracle it could obtain accurate information. Its carefully formulated Five Year Plan must now be translated into reality through the same organizational chain that amassed the information, down to the same shopfloor supervisor and collective farm manager. At every step the instructions are subject to creative interpretation and being just plain ignored. The Central Tractor Committee, knowing the impossibility of getting parts to make 20,000 tractors, adds an “in principle” to the plan. The farm manager, knowing that his people will never get enough food supplies to live well through the winter, grows an extra hundred tons of corn and stocks it. And so on.

Acknowledgements

Tony Lauck led the Distributed Systems Architecture group at DEC, and was my manager for several years. As a manager he was pretty challenging at times, but as a mentor he was extraordinary. He had (still has, I guess) the most incredible grasp of what you have to do to get complicated systems to work, or perhaps more accurately what you have to avoid doing. At first encounter, spending a whole day arguing over some fraction of the design of a protocol seemed like pedantry in the extreme. It was only later that you came to realise that this is the only way to build complex systems that work, and work under all conditions. With the dissolution of DEC, the “Lauck School of Protocol Design” has become distributed throughout the industry, to the great benefit of all. A whole book could be written about it, citing examples both positive and negative – were it not for the fact that Tony is still very much alive, BGP for example would have him spinning in his grave.

Jac Simensen was my boss (or thereabouts) at DEC for several years. It would be an exaggeration to say he taught me everything I know about management, but he was the first senior manager I saw in action from close-up, and one of the very best managers I’ve ever worked for. He certainly gave me an excellent grounding when I quite unexpectedly found myself managing a group of nearly 100 people, by a long way the biggest group I’d ever led at the time.