Mohamed Nanabhay's Blog

I usually warn about ideas getting "bigerised" at the organisations I'm involved in. It's a sure way to derail a great idea. Of course, the concept is not my own - so I present another cool story from from Michael Hiltzik’s “Dealers of Lightening – Xerox PARC and the Dawn of the Computer Age", where I first read about "biggerism" a few years ago:

The Berkley Computer Corporation (BCC) pioneers were about to become victims of the “second-system effect”. The theory of the second systems was formulated by an IBM executive named Frederick Brooks, whose career supervising large-scale software teams taught him that designers of computer systems tend to build into their second projects all the pet features that tight finances or short deadlines forced them to leave out of their first. The result is an overgrown, inefficient monstrosity that rarely works as expected. As he put it in his pithy masterpiece, The Mythical Man-Month: “The second is the most dangerous system a man ever designs.” The BCC machine could have sprung full-blown from the pages of Brook’s text. As Lampson recalled, the designers of the economical and practical SDS 940 regarded their next machine as an opportunity to “look at all the things you could make much more wonderful, and plan to make them all more wonderful by creating a system that could handle a lot more users and much larger programs and was much faster and used computing resources much more efficiently and was better and more wonderful in every possible way. “It was not a very realistic enterprise,” he acknowledged. “But at the time is seemed great, the proper next step, as second systems often do.”… Some of the workers, including Thacker, could tell early on that the project was getting out of hand. The engineer’s engineer possessed the unique trait of aiming for less, not more, in his systems. “This was so unusual for an engineer,” recalled Charles Simonyi, a young immigrant from communist Hungary who assisted Thacker, watching as he chain-smoked through the night designing the machine’s logic, “He had this word for what was happening. He called it ‘biggerism’. I heard this word from him and my English was not that good and I always thought it sounded slightly obscene, because he’d say, you know, ‘This project has been biggered.’”

This lesson goes beyond systems - it applies to any activity which requires a bit of planning.