4 ms·

> Why have I never heard of any software team ever saying "There's nothing for you to do right now, so just wait"? In addition to Parkinson's Law, there's this

> Why have I never heard of any software team ever saying "There's nothing for you to do right now, so just wait"? In addition to Parkinson's Law, there's this one: "A poem is never finished; it is only abandoned." There's never nothing to do, because we can always improve things. And to a business or to a manager, "just wait" costs about as much as "work on something of little importance" but provides less benefit. It might be different if programmers were all on zero-hour contracts. (OTOH... Firing engineers could work. I wonder why sites that seem "done" don't decrease their payrolls. Pride?)

yourbandsucks 8y ago
Individual incentive. Every manager wants a bigger team and impactful projects for their resume. This bubbles up to the top, where rarefied execs don't see a reason to go to war with their own org and possibly lose. As long as it's still profitable, everyone's doing fine.
ken 8y ago
I disagree that "we can always improve things". That only works in a few fields. When Tom Wolfe was finishing up a new novel, adding more writers wouldn't improve the story. When a cancer patient is undergoing chemo, adding more physicians this afternoon won't improve the outcome. Adding cooks to the kitchen of my favorite noodle shop isn't going to improve the noodles one bit. Adding more actors to a film's shoot schedule isn't going to make it go any faster. In all these cases, even if you gave me 100 more skilled people for free for a week, I'd tell you that we don't need them, and it would actually hurt us for them to participate. Changing the plan or going off-plan has a real cost. Mature fields like civil engineering have a great track record because they don't just let extra people make contributions at any point in the process. BTW, according to Wikiqote, the correct (and unabridged) quote is: "A work is never completed except by some accident such as weariness, satisfaction, the need to deliver, or death: for, in relation to who or what is making it, it can only be one stage in a series of inner transformations." For programming to be a mature field, "the need to deliver" must be a necessary component, and "satisfaction" should be the goal, not merely an "accident". We can't utilize the process of a 19th century French poet and expect to get results like 21st century civil engineers. This was a guy who (according to his Wikipedia article), "around 1898, he quit writing altogether, publishing not a word for nearly twenty years."

yourbandsucks 8y ago

Individual incentive. Every manager wants a bigger team and impactful projects for their resume. This bubbles up to the top, where rarefied execs don't see a reason to go to war with their own org and possibly lose. As long as it's still profitable, everyone's doing fine.

ken 8y ago

I disagree that "we can always improve things". That only works in a few fields. When Tom Wolfe was finishing up a new novel, adding more writers wouldn't improve the story. When a cancer patient is undergoing chemo, adding more physicians this afternoon won't improve the outcome. Adding cooks to the kitchen of my favorite noodle shop isn't going to improve the noodles one bit. Adding more actors to a film's shoot schedule isn't going to make it go any faster. In all these cases, even if you gave me 100 more skilled people for free for a week, I'd tell you that we don't need them, and it would actually hurt us for them to participate. Changing the plan or going off-plan has a real cost. Mature fields like civil engineering have a great track record because they don't just let extra people make contributions at any point in the process. BTW, according to Wikiqote, the correct (and unabridged) quote is: "A work is never completed except by some accident such as weariness, satisfaction, the need to deliver, or death: for, in relation to who or what is making it, it can only be one stage in a series of inner transformations." For programming to be a mature field, "the need to deliver" must be a necessary component, and "satisfaction" should be the goal, not merely an "accident". We can't utilize the process of a 19th century French poet and expect to get results like 21st century civil engineers. This was a guy who (according to his Wikipedia article), "around 1898, he quit writing altogether, publishing not a word for nearly twenty years."