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How do you know they are coming from "good" teams? And if so, isn't it reasonable to suppose that they might carry over good practices in their new environment?
by vannevar 8y ago
How do you know they are coming from "good" teams? And if so, isn't it reasonable to suppose that they might carry over good practices in their new environment?
I don't doubt that there are bad developers---I've definitely encountered them. But software development is a team sport, and it makes no more sense to just "recruit good people and leave them alone" in software than it would to do the same in basketball. Great teams have both talented people and winning strategy.
- Retric 8y agoBecause people regularly do "recruit good people and leave them alone". At my first job I was the only developer working on the project and I rarely spoke with my boss. He came back from a month long vacation and I had not noticed he was gone. That's surprisingly common across the field. Most developers work on small teams doing small but often very long lived projects. Code staying in production for 30 years is surprisingly common outside of SV.
- jon-wood 8y agoThose people, in those positions, probably don't need much in the way of process. If you really can just sit down with the owner of the business, hash things out with them, and then go build something that does what they need then you're golden. And guess what, you're probably doing agile without even knowing it, because agile is attempting to reproduce that in organisations where you can't just put a single developer and a the CEO in a room and expect that to happen.
- vannevar 8y agoThey also regularly "recruit good people and leave them alone" and they fail. And then we look on those people as "bad" people. Which was my original point above.