Re:Effective Engineer – Notes
by Silhouette on Thursday December 28, 2017 @04:36PM
(#16025094)
This means that the days when a person could write the entire thing by himself/herself is over, and a lot more co-operation is required among engineers to design and build effective systems.
At that point, you're not really talking about being an effective engineer, though. You're only talking about being an effective engineer in a large organisation working on a large project.
I know plenty of people in the freelancing and startup world who can build and maintain very significant systems single-handedly. Take someone with the skill and experience to do that, give them a free hand in choosing whatever tools and processes work for them to get a good job done, and remove the overheads of micromanaging this and co-ordinating that. It's not unusual for that person to outperform an entire team working for a competitor under more traditional constraints, or for a small number of such people who can keep the overheads down to outperform a more traditionally organised but mediocre team an order of magnitude larger. Of course these people also need good soft skills, but those are not why they are so productive.
At that point, you're not really talking about being an effective engineer, though. You're only talking about being an effective engineer in a large organisation working on a large project.
I know plenty of people in the freelancing and startup world who can build and maintain very significant systems single-handedly. Take someone with the skill and experience to do that, give them a free hand in choosing whatever tools and processes work for them to get a good job done, and remove the overheads of micromanaging this and co-ordinating that. It's not unusual for that person to outperform an entire team working for a competitor under more traditional constraints, or for a small number of such people who can keep the overheads down to outperform a more traditionally organised but mediocre team an order of magnitude larger. Of course these people also need good soft skills, but those are not why they are so productive.