> You have enough budget for only the first floor, but you have a big family, and you know you’ll want a second one in a couple of years.
> Adding the infrastructure to support a 2nd floor is MUCH cheaper right now than it will be when you actually want that 2nd floor.
The problem with this thinking is it requires certainty about the future. It's much cheaper right now IF AND ONLY IF you end up needing the thing. If you don't need it, then you've threw time and money down the drain.
Where I think this analogy weakens is you probably have far more certainty of whether or not you want a big family then you do on whether or not a new product line will see major adoption.
I am known for analogies. I use them all the time to try and explain things to less technical people.
Sometimes it's building a house, sometimes it's writing a book, sometimes it's the difference between a Ford and a kit car, sometimes it's how you build a bridge.
None of them stand up to full scrutiny. You can pick every single one apart.
That's not the point of analogies. The point is to explain just one of the many aspects of software engineering in a more understandable format to the listener. Software engineering is nothing like building a physical thing. But some of the many, many problems and complexity you hit have physical product analogies.
You should have an idea of where you are going so you don't paint yourself into a corner. However certainty about the future is impossible. You make your best guess and often that will be wrong. That doesn't mean it is wrong to guess, it means you need to temper your guesses.
Given the huge infant mortality rates until very recently in human history, this is often pretty misleading. Life expectancy at say, 2yo, is far greater.
I have several pieces that have survived 3-4 moves. The trick is when assembling, use wood glue with any dowels. On their own, these dowels only have friction to hold them in place, and over time, the surface of the area where they are inserted compresses, reducing friction. Hence you get that typical side to side sway. The glue mitigates this problem.
I don't see this mentioned enough! Wood glue will improve the stability massively.
Obviously beds and huge bookshelves might need to come apart again, so use your best judgement. But chairs, dressers, end-tables, etc. are completely worth it.
This makes any assembly 1-way, though. Some people (with a very high time:money ratio obviously) might find the collapsible, portable nature of Ikea an advantage.
I'm sure I'm not the only person to have built a wall unit in a bedroom only to learn, later, getting it out the door, and through the hall, and down the stairs turns out to be job for Dirk Gently.
That said, moving some of this flat pack furniture has been a mixed bag. Some move well, some don't.
I did have a wall unit, a $99 hardware store particle board piece assembled with big screws and those interesting, round cam fasteners. It survived three separate moves, including one where it flew out the back of my pickup truck onto asphalt (thankfully in a gas station, vs the freeway I was about to get on). Corner got dinged, door flew off, but it survived!
But I've had other pieces that assemble and are rigid, when torqued around through the moving process start to come undone. The particle board and fasteners are designed for loads only in specific directions and tend to not do well, and fail, outside of those.
I've owned a lot of IKEA furniture, and at no point have I ever considered disassembling them. And I don't think IKEA really even advertises their stuff to be a flatpack-to-furniture-to-flatpack design.
> and at no point have I ever considered disassembling them
That is wise. I don't claim disassembling it for move was a good idea, but it compressed my stuff into a compact car.
Consider also that some of their beds don't fit through a doorway built (esp if doorway is not code width) so some level of disassembly may be required for mere room-to-room moving.
I'm only calling out a tradeoff that may or may not apply. Not everyone is you and me.
> I don't think IKEA really even advertises their stuff to be a
The whole point of this thread (this site?) is repurposing outside of creator intent.
There's a lot of great things about this piece, but I'm kind of stuck on the "Hieronymus Bosch Butt Music". Listened to it a bunch of times now. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OnrICy3Bc2U
'Ambitious' often means doing optional things that take time.
A single person who cuts back on time spent doom scrolling / tv watching / beer drinking to teach themselves enterprise Kubernetes sysadmin best practices is ambitious.
A new parent who cuts back on time with their kids to teach themselves enterprise Kubernetes sysadmin best practices needs their head checked.
I didn’t like what the market was offering, and I didn’t like depending on other people not firing me, so I made one for myself where I can work on what I like the way I like (started a small software business).
You can, too. It’s the simplest and cheapest business to start in the entire history of humankind, and you literally just sit with your laptop at home all day pressing buttons
Did you forget what the post we're commenting on is about?
I watch a toddler all day so my wife can do her best to not get let go too along with household work that other people pay people to do. I'm not building a business that can pay my mortgage with 2 hours of free time at night.
I’m far less ambitious, but not less driven. It’s just that what I’m driving for is to maximize time doing things I and my family enjoy. In fact it’s a lens through which I analyze jobs and career opportunities.
Not necessarily, everyone's got their own preferences and sensitivities, it's just how brains work and how it works differently for everyone.
It's too simplistic to just apply a label like ADHD to people. Preferring distraction or silence is only a small part of the diagnostic criteria, and modern diagnostics are more about "how well do you function / how much / what help do you need" than applying a label.
The problem with this thinking is it requires certainty about the future. It's much cheaper right now IF AND ONLY IF you end up needing the thing. If you don't need it, then you've threw time and money down the drain.
Where I think this analogy weakens is you probably have far more certainty of whether or not you want a big family then you do on whether or not a new product line will see major adoption.