from Hacker News

Opportunity Sizing: Is the Juice Worth the Squeeze?

by harterrt on 4/16/21, 11:53 AM with 25 comments

• by dandellion on 4/18/21, 2:15 AM

  I wonder if this kind of reasoning might be why Mozilla keeps dropping features of Firefox I liked such as RSS, bookmark descriptions, FTP, while adding stuff I don't care about like Pocket and Hello. I've recently finally caved in and installed Chromium and Brave, to see if they might be worth switching because of the reasons I had for using Firefox are just not there any more. After 15 years using Firefox (and advocating for it and installing it on many of my families computers for many years) it's hard to switch, and with the state of privacy and tracking I feel like my only choice is to pick what type of poison I want to drink.

• by tziki on 4/18/21, 11:55 AM

  Something like this should be part of every engineering curriculum. As a small anecdote, I've several times ran into engineers who spent inordinate amounts of time to make the system just a tiny bit more type safer, and when I ask how many bugs would this have fixed during the last year they don't know. When I do the work and send them the single, low-impact bug their efforts would've fixed, they still go through mental gynastics to justify their efforts.

• by bcherny on 4/18/21, 1:00 AM

  This is one of those “Product Management 101” things that engineers are surprisingly bad at. I couldn’t agree more that this is an essential skill for engineers (especially sr engineers), whether they’re working on infra, growth, or product.

• by coolgeek on 4/19/21, 8:39 PM

  harterrt - I hope you're still reading this...

  This is a really good (initial) framework for thinking about what new features should or should not be built.

  But I would advise against using it (alone) as a tool for deciding which existing features should be removed (as other readers suggest may be happening).

  With new features, it's a binary choice - build or not.

  With existing features, there is a third choice - continue development, stop development (but maintain), or remove feature. Removing features has costs that might not be worth the savings.

  Google lost a lot of goodwill over the last few years by unceremoniously dropping products. Mozilla, over the last year or so, seems to be making some of the same mistakes.

  Chromium is terrible enough that users don't really have an alternative - at the moment. But goodwill is really hard to get back after it's been squandered.

• by cassepipe on 4/18/21, 9:12 AM

  One sure thing is when you actually finish a project it might be worth trying to market it or just wait a little to see where it can go. See Firefox OS, or how we could have had an android independant alternative phone os and how Mozilla could have been financially independent thanks to revenues that are now going to KaiOS.