Re:John Carmack's Quake Worklogs
by neilv on Saturday October 07, 2023 @04:42PM
(#37805367)
There are some sweet spots to be found in software development productivity.
Finding them is an art/craft, and very sensitive to the project/company context, the people you have available, how the work will be distributed, etc. It includes making process lightweight by default, and having a good sense of when to use something non-lightweight.
In the right circumstances, a few top "programmers" with great team software engineering sense, and someone representing product sense, unencumbered by BS, can usually wipe the floor with most contemporary much-larger teams.
But starting off a startup by saying "We'll do Leetcode rituals so we know we'll hire aspiring techbros who spent their spare time at Stanford memorizing those, and we'll (pretend to) use this fashionable branded lifecycle process designed for companies that have no idea what they're doing but have a lot of warm bodies to fumble blindly through it, and ignore unfashionable process tools that we were confidently told don't work by students with zero experience based on what a professor with zero experience told them, and this huge list of popular tech we heard of and will never understand will be our stack, and then we can show promise to get to the next funding round and hire even more warm bodies..." is one way to make the road to finding effective expertise much longer. :)
Finding them is an art/craft, and very sensitive to the project/company context, the people you have available, how the work will be distributed, etc. It includes making process lightweight by default, and having a good sense of when to use something non-lightweight.
In the right circumstances, a few top "programmers" with great team software engineering sense, and someone representing product sense, unencumbered by BS, can usually wipe the floor with most contemporary much-larger teams.
But starting off a startup by saying "We'll do Leetcode rituals so we know we'll hire aspiring techbros who spent their spare time at Stanford memorizing those, and we'll (pretend to) use this fashionable branded lifecycle process designed for companies that have no idea what they're doing but have a lot of warm bodies to fumble blindly through it, and ignore unfashionable process tools that we were confidently told don't work by students with zero experience based on what a professor with zero experience told them, and this huge list of popular tech we heard of and will never understand will be our stack, and then we can show promise to get to the next funding round and hire even more warm bodies..." is one way to make the road to finding effective expertise much longer. :)