Tokyo to Saigon — The Only Way Out of a Death March

December 30, 2022. I was working right up to the eve of New Year’s Eve.

The staff and our partners were all off, and Slack was quiet. Finally, some time to lose myself in programming — or so I thought, when a message came in from my friend in Vietnam, Hector.

Hector and I met ten years ago at the 500 Startups accelerator, the well-known Silicon Valley venture program. He was the lead engineer of a startup chosen from Vietnam; I had joined a friend’s startup as a developer for just the second half of the program. Both programmers, both Asian, our tables right next to each other — we hit it off immediately.

His message was to tell me that his company’s investor had collapsed, and they had to close the company. But he wanted to keep working with his core team of five. If there was a project they could all build together, he wanted to take it and keep the team intact. Did I have any work? — that was the message.

For a few years before the pandemic, I had wanted to start a company in Vietnam. I’d done research, taken on Vietnamese interns, and I’d told Hector about all of it. So things moved fast. Could we set up a company in Vietnam and build a structure where the projects Goldrush Computing runs in Japan could be shared across the sea?

The last working day of the year. I’d been planning to go home and have a beer. Instead, out of nowhere, came a genuine turning point in my life.

A company with no work yet

There was a reason I could decide so fast. Going back ten years, I’d teamed up with Vietnamese engineers and designers more than once, and each time I came away with the same feeling: the pace and the communication just click with these people. Someday I wanted to open an office in Ho Chi Minh City and work alongside them. I’d been holding onto that idea for a long time.

That said, opening a company on the ground does not make work start flowing. In the early days, honestly, there was a long stretch with no new projects for the Vietnam team at all.

I remember the day I met the team for the first time. Goldrush is an office full of women; the Ho Chi Minh team was the exact opposite — six science-major guys. When I opened the office door, all of them were there, smiling, to welcome me.

There were only desks in the office. Everyone brought monitors from home, or set their Mac on a little wooden box to raise it to eye level. Until the company was officially registered it didn’t legally exist, so anything bought in that window couldn’t be expensed — which meant the external monitors came out of my own pocket. And with no work yet, our weekly meetings had no agenda. A junior engineer, L, suggested a question — “What’s the worst thing you’ve ever eaten?” — and we’d all answer, doubling as English speaking practice.

Days of feeling our way through a tunnel. But little by little, some light started to show.

The local project falls apart

Before long, I was forced into a big decision.

There was a large project we’d taken on from a local client in Vietnam. And it just would not go well. Even pouring in far more people than planned, we couldn’t hit the monthly milestones. When I dug into it, I found the work was going to take more than twice the original estimate.

Even after fifteen years of doing this since going independent, I still misjudge estimates sometimes. But I’d never seen the actual effort come in at more than double. This time what we were building was huge — an entire system, front end, back end, and infrastructure all built from scratch, a year-long project. At double the effort, covering the gap out of our own pocket becomes very hard.

If I’m honest, the fault was partly mine. The local client only spoke Vietnamese, so I’d left everything to the team on the ground. That was the mistake.

”The only way out is to cut features to the bone”

At that moment, a line from a university professor came back to me.

As an undergraduate, I was in a software engineering lab. Software engineering isn’t the craft of building itself, like programming — it’s the discipline one level up: requirements, effort estimation, quality management, the meta-view of how software gets built.

The professor whose lab I chose was the only one in the department without a doctorate or even a master’s — someone who had come up through the field. He’d been through many enormous projects at NEC, where the very best computer engineers in Japan gathered at the time, and he had wisdom no one else did.

To be honest, back then I couldn’t get interested in software engineering. I only wanted to learn the craft of building, so I didn’t really listen to him. I don’t remember much.

But one thing has stayed in my head ever since:

When a software development project turns into a death march, the only way out is to cut features to the absolute bone.

Adding people, adding budget, pushing back the schedule — none of it gets you out. The only road out is to cut. That’s what he meant.

The local project in Vietnam was exactly the situation he’d described.

The power to cut, the power to finish

Because that lesson was in my head, whenever I meet a project that looks like it could become a death march, I make time to talk it through with the client before it starts. Can we cut the spec? Can we make it simpler? Can we split it and move part of it to a later phase?

And if it still can’t be cut — if the project is small, I might take the risk, but if it’s large, I sometimes decline it, or take on only the prototype phase and step away after that.

It may sound cold. But charging into a death march doesn’t only hurt the maker. In the end, it costs the client too. So deciding “we won’t,” “let’s cut,” “let’s draw the line here” is also for their sake.

Stories about new ventures overflow with how to begin. But after a long time building products, the part I find genuinely hard isn’t starting. It’s deciding where to cut, what to end, and what to keep. The power to carry an idea through to completion is inseparable from the power to decide what not to build.

Our days in Vietnam pressed that truth on me all over again.

— This story I learned in Saigon still has more to it. I intend to write how it all turned out in a separate article before long.