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It never seems complicated when I am doing my own side work for some reason. There are no design meetings, no hours tracking, no arguments on best practices, no

It never seems complicated when I am doing my own side work for some reason. There are no design meetings, no hours tracking, no arguments on best practices, no scrum, no testing frameworks, dev ops, etc. I do use git and minimally create bash scripts to simplify repetitive tasks for deployment but its just a huge contrast to working in teams where something simple takes about 50 times longer. I think keeping things as simple as possible and always going for that goal will increase velocity overall. Everything should be subject to scrutiny for promoting productivity and open to modification or removal. I know there is a balance where you have to increase complexity in a team environment but keeping friction as low as possible in terms of process and intellectual weight couldn't hurt. The most productive place I've seen so far is a huge athletic brand I worked for where they kept teams at max 5 people in mini projects. This forced the idea of low overhead and kept the scale of management needed small. The worst place I worked for in terms of unnecessary complexity is a well known host, although it is the best place to work in terms of people, hired offshore that has a one-size fits all mentality and layered in as much shit as possible to slow down development to a mud crawl. I don't buy into process over productivity.

ashark 10y ago
One of the things that helps when you're developing your own projects is that you can single-handedly decide to ruthlessly cull parts of the project that take lots of time but provide little value, and you (probably) have decent insight into what those are. You're also probably not at a scale where doing certain really crappy, slow parts of the job can pay off, so you can skip those. Default form elements with some basic, nice styling to fit your theme? Form done in one hour. Special snowflake version of the same thing from the design team, which has no idea what the platform can and cannot easily be made to do, but the client is absolutely in love with? Two days, a third party dependency or two, some extra environment-specific bugs to track down later, and generally increased fragility (so more time lost in the future). This has slowed you down now and increased the resources required for the project indefinitely. But the client looooooves it. Support Android pre-5.0, at the cost of 20% more development time, a pile of extra bug reports, an uglier, harder-to-maintain codebase, and a much much longer testing cycle, for a side project? Hell no. Client says that will cost them $4 million/yr not to support those? Ugh. FINE. And so on, and so on.

ashark 10y ago

One of the things that helps when you're developing your own projects is that you can single-handedly decide to ruthlessly cull parts of the project that take lots of time but provide little value, and you (probably) have decent insight into what those are. You're also probably not at a scale where doing certain really crappy, slow parts of the job can pay off, so you can skip those. Default form elements with some basic, nice styling to fit your theme? Form done in one hour. Special snowflake version of the same thing from the design team, which has no idea what the platform can and cannot easily be made to do, but the client is absolutely in love with? Two days, a third party dependency or two, some extra environment-specific bugs to track down later, and generally increased fragility (so more time lost in the future). This has slowed you down now and increased the resources required for the project indefinitely. But the client looooooves it. Support Android pre-5.0, at the cost of 20% more development time, a pile of extra bug reports, an uglier, harder-to-maintain codebase, and a much much longer testing cycle, for a side project? Hell no. Client says that will cost them $4 million/yr not to support those? Ugh. FINE. And so on, and so on.