Re:Things I’ve learned in my 20 years as a software engineer
by pjc50 on Friday October 08, 2021 @10:05AM
(#28799426)
The "MVP" or "strawman" is incredibly valuable; people can't tell a blank sheet of paper what they want, but if you show them a thing they'll tell you what's wrong with it.
I've noticed myself that I can happily write detailed comments on HN or StackOverflow but have no inclination for blog posts, for that kind of self-content-marketing that seems to be popular these days.
Re:Things I’ve learned in my 20 years as a software engineer
by bigbizisverywyz on Friday October 08, 2021 @11:56AM
(#28800662)
>sometimes everyone else gets paralyzed with indecision and can’t even get started.
I once worked on a project where exactly that happened, and I view it as one of my biggest failures of my career. I often wonder why I didn't just sit down one day and type int main( ... and just get on with it.
In the end the project got canned and both contractors terminated early, so I made sure that never happened again.
Someone who can sit down and start coding in an ambiguous environment, period, can easily make 10x more value themselves, and allow others to go from .1x to 1-5x merely by being able to pick somewhere to start and just doing it, which allows everyone else to break their own ‘freeze’ and start engaging as now there is something concrete that breaks the locked up state they were in.
I’ve done it a few times, and seen others do it to. It’s magic going from ‘everyone rehashing things on a whiteboard for the 10th time’ to ‘everyone working on the next iteration’