202510041233 Compression of reality

The expression "where the rubber meets the road" expresses the idea that we can talk or think about things in abstract much of the time, but there will be a point where concrete reality happens.

I've also previously called this "the compression of reality" because of my experiences working in software engineering at product companies. The idea is that almost all people will push reality out of their purview if possible. Executives will discuss vision and strategy without understanding the reality of implementing or achieving it. Product managers will discuss products in vague terms that aren't specific enough and often contradictory. Managers will ask for people to accomplish things on timelines that aren't realistic. All of these are demonstrations of 202408220851 Willful ignorance of reality in organizations. In the end though the software engineer (or any individual contributor) has to actually encode the exact, real, final behavior of the code. There is no longer room for the vagueness of natural human language. All of the reality has been compressed down into the last possible moment and now the IC has to deal with all the ramifications of ignoring reality until this point. This can be relatively benign (e.g., just making decisions and writing code about behaviors of features) or harmful (e.g., the feature cannot ever work because of some concrete problem).