Verschlimmbesserung: The German Word That Explains Your Last Software Update
Verschlimmbesserung: The Word Your Software Updates Need
The German language has a word for what your last software update did: Verschlimmbesserung, an attempted improvement that makes things worse. This post argues that such updates are often the result of misaligned metrics. Drawing on Eliyahu Goldratt's insight that behavior follows measurement, it explains how rewarding shipping or churn incentivizes pointless changes. Stability is a feature, and knowing when not to ship is an engineering discipline. Maybe it's time to adopt this word.
Tell me how you measure me, and I will tell you how I will behave. If you measure me in an illogical way… do not complain about illogical behaviour…
- dwoldrich
Value is now only _extracted_. Place the acquired good into the press and smash it until all but the faintest essence remains among the mash. The squeezings are bottled and saved to pay for future _extractions_.
Companies like Valve can continue largely unshittificated because they are private. Once that is no longer the case, all our game rentals will be squozen away from us.
- zby
In the age of LLMs it is important to have vocabulary that survives when taken out of context - German nouns fit that very well. In my own project I decided to use phrases of two words (often with a hyphen) for all technical terms (terms that have special meaning in my project).
And by the way I also started using Auftragstaktik as an anchor for a methodology of writing plans and prompts.
- OroPla
German here. A "Verschlimmbesserung" is something that makes one part better and another part worse. If it only makes things worse you don't need a German word for it, you can just call it worse.
For things that were intended good, but ended up bad, there's an English idiom: the path to hell is paved with good intentions.
- OptionOfT
I usually relate this to people chasing good reviews at work. Maintaining a system and keeping it bug-free doesn't get people promoted.
Doing something large, inventing a bunch of metrics, and showing that you improve on those metrics does.
- andai
People equate work with value.
That's largely a function of incentives.
If a startup could have been a 100 line PHP script, instead of 50 microservices, then you wouldn't be able to work on it for the next 10 years, and hire 5 of your buds from school.
- herbst
It's not even funny how often that word sounds in my head these days
- alhirzel
I would probably abbreviate that to v17g.
- arjan_sch
What about "worseprovement"