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I think the points about accidental vs essential complexity are well made. However... The title/s are about Silver Bullets, and I strongly do not believe in th

I think the points about accidental vs essential complexity are well made. However... The title/s are about Silver Bullets, and I strongly do not believe in them. I've been programming for an embarrassing number of years, and I've seen methodologies come and go. Increasing productivity is about developing a good team culture with a small number of simple tools, not about following the latest Silver Bullet. In fact, it's very easy to increase the level of accidental complexity by adopting an overly prescriptive or complex tool/methodology (Jira anyone?).

davedx 7y ago
Right there with you! I've also been programming a while now, and the biggest improvements to productivity, code quality, and overall success are indeed building a good team and keeping things simple. That hasn't changed since the 80's/90's when I first started out. It's also true that overly prescriptive tooling can be such a pain. This also includes automated testing in my opinion (something the author counts as a big advance). It's fantastic for certain classes of software code and terrible for others. I've seen half my team spend multiple days just fixing integration or e2e tests instead of working on features that add value. You can grind to a halt with this stuff just as much as you can grind to a halt because of so many bugs to fix... You have to find the balance, and I think that's where senior engineers really add value -- they've been round the block a few times and have a better idea where that balance lies.