HACKER Q&A
📣 hnthrowaway0328

Create pinball machines for your team


This is sort of Discuss HN instead of Ask HN.

I just finished reading "The Soul of A New Machine". It is a marvellous book that talks about tech, management and ultimately, people. But one particular rule stands out:

> They believed in the rule of pinball: if you win, you get to play again; but failure is unthinkable, so you'd better let no one get in your way.

I can relate. I believe in the axiom that I should pour into whatever I love to do, 70/80/100 hours a week, and don't worry about financial rewards because they will come along eventually. In all of the gigs I worked for and am working for, I had/have to create mini pinball machines for myself because one rarely gets what one loves to do.

In this respect, I completely agree with people who re-invent wheels, who do NOT do things "the boring way". Work is boring already, and pinball machines are rare. One has to find some fun by oneself. This, of course, leaves unforeseen consequences, or are they really unforeseen?

It is therefore important, and beneficial for managers to create sort of a pinball experience for the team. It doesn't have to be a real pinball machine -- I mean, it doesn't have to be the most exciting thing. In fact, as the book states, the Eagle was actually a boring product to build. It is the atmosphere created by West and other executives that ultimately motivates the whole team and made the experience memorable. It was not the $$ rewards (no stock option), not the product (a boring machine), but the freedom -- sometimes frightening that drives the pinball machine.

  👤 eternityforest Accepted Answer ✓
At least 70% of techies will probably be way happier if you do this. I don't like seeing things that aren't boring in real production, but there are other uses like promos and demos.

I don't care much about the low tech analog aspect, but I'd participate just as a social thing, although I'd be much more interested in the creative side than the retro tech, so I think it's important to not have the project purely tech-focused, so as to not leave out the people who aren't primarily motivated by ideas and abstractions like most devs.

👤 hnthrowaway0328
I shared this piece of thought because I, as many of you, work in a large corporate environment and we don't really have a lot of those pinball machines around.

I'm sure that if you started from the 70s/80s/90s, when computing is still a blue sea, there were a lot of pinball machines so anyone with some skills can pick up one or two. But tech advances and everything becomes so complicated nowadays. The good old days were gone.