13/08/13 Big Macs vs. The Naked Chef - Joel on Software

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Joel on Software

Big Macs vs. The Naked Chefby Joel Spolsky

Thursday, January 18, 2001

Mystery: why is it that some of the biggest IT consulting companies inthe world do the worst work?

Why is it that the cool upstart consulting companies start out with astring of spectacular successes, meteoric growth, and rapidlydegenerate into mediocrity?

I've been thinking about this, and thinking about how Fog CreekSoftware (my own company) should grow. And the best lessons I canfind come from McDonald's. Yes, I mean the awful hamburger chain.

The secret of Big Macs is that they're not very good, but every one isnot very good in exactly the same way. If you're willing to live withnot-very-goodness, you can have a Big Mac with absolutely no chanceof being surprised in the slightest.

The other secret of Big Macs is that you can have an IQ that hoverssomewhere between "idiot" and "moron" (to use the technical terms)and you'll still be able to produce Big Macs that are exactly asunsurprising as all the other Big Macs in the world. That's becauseMcDonald's real secret sauce is its huge operations manual,describing in stunning detail the exact procedure that everyfranchisee must follow in creating a Big Mac. If a Big Mac hamburgeris fried for 37 seconds in Anchorage, Alaska, it will be fried for 37seconds in Singapore - not 36, not 38. To make a Big Mac you justfollow the damn rules.

The rules have been carefully designed by reasonably intelligentpeople (back at McDonald's Hamburger University) so that dumdumscan follow them just as well as smart people. In fact the rules includeall kinds of failsafes, like bells that go off if you keep the fries in theoil too long, which were created to compensate for more than a littlehuman frailty. There are stopwatches and timing systems everywhere.There is a system to make sure that the janitor checks if thebathrooms are clean every half hour. (Hint: they're not.)

The system basically assumes that everybody will make a bunch ofmistakes, but the burgers that come out will be, um, consistent, and

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you'll always be asked if you want fries with that.

Just for the sake of amusement, let's compare a McDonald's cook,who is following a set of rules exactly and doesn't know anythingabout food, to a genius like The Naked Chef, the British cutie JamieOliver. (If you chose to leave this site now and follow that link towatch the MTV-like videos of The Naked Chef making basil aioli, youhave my blessing. Go in good health.) Anyway, comparing McDonald'sto a gourmet chef is completely absurd, but please suspend disbelieffor a moment, because there's something to be learned here.

Now, the Naked Chef doesn't follow no stinkin' Operations Manual.He doesn't measure anything. While he's cooking, you see a flurry offood tossed around willy-nilly. "We'll just put a bit of extra rosemaryin there, that won't hurt, and give it a good old shake," he says. " Mashit up. Perfect. Just chuck it all over the place." (Yes, it really looks likehe's just chucking it all over the place. Sorry, but if I tried to chuck itall over the place, it wouldn't work.) It takes about 14 seconds andhe's basically improvised a complete gourmet meal with roastedslashed fillet of sea-bass stuffed with herbs, baked on mushroompotatoes with a salsa-verde. Yum.

Well, I think it's pretty obvious that The Naked Chef's food is betterthan you get at McDonald's. Even if it sounds like a stupid question,it's worth a minute to ask why. It's not such a stupid question. Whycan't a big company with zillions of resources, incredible scale, accessto the best food designers money can buy, and infinite cash flowproduce a nice meal?

Imagine that The Naked Chef gets bored doing "telly" and opens arestaurant. Of course, he's a brilliant chef, the food would beincredible, so the place is hopping with customers and shockinglyprofitable.

When you have a shockingly profitable restaurant, you quickly realizethat even if you fill up every night, and even if you charge $19 for anappetizer and $3.95 for a coke, your profits reach a natural limit,because one chef can only make so much food. So you hire anotherchef, and maybe open some more branches, maybe in other cities.

Now a problem starts to develop: what we in the technical fields callthe scalability problem. When you try to clone a restaurant, you haveto decide between hiring another great chef of your caliber (in whichcase, that chef will probably want and expect to keep most of theextra profits that he created, so why bother), or else you'll hire acheaper, younger chef who's not quite as good, but pretty soon yourpatrons will figure that out and they won't go to the clone restaurant.

The common way of dealing with the scalability problem is to hirecheap chefs who don't know anything, and give them such preciserules about how to create every dish that they "can't" screw it up. Justfollow these here rules, and you'll make great gourmet food!

Problem: it doesn't work exactly right. There are a million things thata good chef does that have to do with improvisation. A good chef seessome awesome mangos in the farmer's market and improvises amango-cilantro salsa for the fish of the day. A good chef deals with atemporary shortage of potatoes by creating some taro chip thing. Anautomaton chef who is merely following instructions might be able toproduce a given dish when everything is working perfectly, butwithout real talent and skill, will not be able to improvise, which iswhy you never see jicama at McDonald's.

McDonald's requires a very particular variety of potato, which theygrow all over the world, and which they pre-cut and freeze in massive

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quantities to survive shortages. The precutting and freezing meansthat the french-fries are not as good as they could be, but they arecertainly consistent and require no chef-skills. In fact, McDonald'sdoes hundreds of things to make sure that their product can beproduced with consistent quality, by any moron you can get in thekitchen, even if the quality is "a bit" lower.

Summary, so far:

1. Some things need talent to do really well.2. It's hard to scale talent.3. One way people try to scale talent is by having the talent create

rules for the untalented to follow.4. The quality of the resulting product is very low.

You can see the exact same story playing out in IT consulting. Howmany times have you heard this story?

Mike was unhappy. He had hired a huge company of ITconsultants to build The System. The IT consultants he hired wereincompetents who kept talking about "The Methodology" andwho spent millions of dollars and had failed to produce a singlething.

Luckily, Mike found a youthful programmer who was really smartand talented. The youthful programmer built his whole system inone day for $20 and pizza. Mike was overjoyed. He recommendedthe youthful programmer to all his friends.

Youthful Programmer starts raking in the money. Soon, he hasmore work than he can handle, so he hires a bunch of people tohelp him. The good people want too many stock options, so hedecides to hire even younger programmers right out of collegeand "train them" with a 6 week course.

The trouble is that the "training" doesn't really produce consistentresults, so Youthful Programmer starts creating rules andprocedures that are meant to make more consistent results. Overthe years, the rule book grows and grows. Soon it's a six-volumemanual called The Methodology.

After a few dozen years, Youthful Programmer is now a HugeIncompetent IT Consultant with a capital-M-methodology and alot of people who blindly obey the Methodology, even when itdoesn't seem to be working, because they have no bloody ideawhatsoever what else to do, and they're not really talentedprogrammers -- they're just well-meaning Poli Sci majors whoattended the six-week course.

And Newly Huge Incompetent IT Consultant starts messing up.Their customers are unhappy. And another upstart talentedprogrammer comes and takes away all their business, and thecycle begins anew.

I don't need to name names, here, this cycle has happened a dozentimes. All the IT service companies get greedy and try to grow fasterthan they can find talented people, and they grow layers upon layersof rules and procedures which help produce "consistent," if not verybrilliant work.

But the rules and procedures only work when nothing goes wrong.Various "data-backed Web site" consulting companies sprouted up inthe last couple of years and filled their ranks by teaching rankamateurs the fourteen things you need to know to create a data-backed Web site ("here's a select statement, kid, build a Web site").But now that dotcoms are imploding and there's suddenly demand forhigh-end GUI programming, C++ skills, and real computer science,

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the kids who only have select statements in their arsenal just have toosteep a learning curve and can't catch up. But they still keep trying,following the rules in chapter 17 about normalizing databases, whichmysteriously don't apply to The New World. The brilliant founders ofthese companies could certainly adjust to the new world: they aretalented computer scientists who can learn anything, but thecompany they built can't adjust because it has substituted a rulebookfor talent, and rulebooks don't adjust to new times.

What's the moral of the story? Beware of Methodologies. They area great way to bring everyone up to a dismal, but passable, level ofperformance, but at the same time, they are aggravating to moretalented people who chafe at the restrictions that are placed on them.It's pretty obvious to me that a talented chef is not going to be happymaking burgers at McDonald's, precisely because of McDonald'srules. So why do IT consultants brag so much about theirmethodologies? (Beats me.)

What does this mean for Fog Creek? Well, our goal has never been tobecome a huge consulting company. We started out doing consultingas a means to an end -- the long-term goal was to be a softwarecompany that is always profitable, and we achieved that by doingsome consulting work to supplement our software income. After acouple of years in business our software revenues grew to the pointwhere consulting was just a low-margin distraction, so now we onlydo consulting engagements that directly support our software.Software, as you know, scales incredibly well. When one new personbuys FogBUGZ, we make more money without spending any moremoney.

More important is our obsession with hiring the best... we areperfectly happy to stay small if we can't find enough good people(although with six weeks annual vacation, finding people doesn't seemto pose a problem). And we refuse to grow until the people wealready hired have learned enough to become teachers and mentors ofthe new crowd.

Next: Daily Builds Are Your Friend 

Want to know more? You’re reading Joel on Software, stuffed withyears and years of completely raving mad articles about softwaredevelopment, managing software teams, designing user interfaces,running successful software companies, and rubber duckies.

About the author. I’m Joel Spolsky, co-founder of Fog CreekSoftware, a New York company that proves that you can treatprogrammers well and still be highly profitable. Programmers getprivate offices, free lunch, and work 40 hours a week. Customers onlypay for software if they’re delighted. We make Trello, insanely simpleproject management, FogBugz, an enlightened bug tracker designedto help great teams develop brilliant software, and Kiln, whichsimplifies source control. I’m also the co-founder and CEO of StackExchange. More about me.

© 2000­2013 Joel Spolskyjoel@joelonsoftware.com

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