Interlude - Index of

70 | Turbulent Adolescence
bought the small­company version anyway, knowing it would
break soon, because the one for big companies was too expensive.
Even with a giant discount, we couldn’t have afforded the
customization required to install it or the people to operate it.
Companies in hypergrowth are rare, so application vendors
don’t optimize for their needs. The result is lots of problems.
It is tempting to fix every problem, but that is a mistake.
The old saying “a stitch in time saves nine” is fine if you only
have one problem. But what if you have a thousand problems?
It would take a thousand stitches to prevent them all. Better to
fix the few that are deadly and ignore the rest. Don’t fix a problem
because it’s painful; fix it because it impedes growth.
We accumulated lots of painful problems, and people naturally
complained. “What moron designed this inadequate system?”
It does not inspire confidence if new people believe they
were brought into a company to clean up someone else’s mess.
I tried to help them understand that even good systems break
under the strain of doubling. Whoever put the system in place
probably did the best they could with the resources they had.
Brian Ehrmantraut was our seventeenth employee, and he
focused on making NetApp more mature. He wrote a process
manual documenting the steps required to accomplish various
tasks. Years later, Brian was working on a problem and
came up with an innovative solution. A much more recent
employee told him, “We can’t do that. It’s not how NetApp
does business.”
“What are you talking about?” Brian asked. The employee
went to the shelf, grabbed a book, and flipped it open: “See, it
says right here that we have to do it this way.”
Brian looked at him and said, “Don’t give me this bullshit.
We were a thirty­person company when that was written.