> "As a technologist, you know that the worst thing that you can do is over-constrain the problem before you start. You'll kill creativity and prevent yourself from getting a truly great outcome."
> As an engineer, I love hearing firm constraints from the beginning.
Sure, but note that these two points aren't in conflict. As someone building solutions, of course you want as firm a definition of the problem as possible, and constraints are part of that. But its still a critical failure to over-constrain the problem at the start (or any other time) -- constraints are essentially just a different way of phrasing requirements, and overconstraining a problem is exactly specifying superfluous requirements. Extra, unneeded constraints make the ultimate solution worse, because they mean you are solving the wrong problem -- and a more complicated problem than the one you actually needed to solve.
>But its still a critical failure to over-constrain
Well yes tautologies are tautological and all, but the point is that GP and the people agree with it suspect that their definition of "over-constrain" happens way way past where the article's author does.
> As an engineer, I love hearing firm constraints from the beginning.
Sure, but note that these two points aren't in conflict. As someone building solutions, of course you want as firm a definition of the problem as possible, and constraints are part of that. But its still a critical failure to over-constrain the problem at the start (or any other time) -- constraints are essentially just a different way of phrasing requirements, and overconstraining a problem is exactly specifying superfluous requirements. Extra, unneeded constraints make the ultimate solution worse, because they mean you are solving the wrong problem -- and a more complicated problem than the one you actually needed to solve.