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> Now that I can see the code, I understand why the dev shop needed so many people working on it, and why all features were hard to do. It's because when you us
by OrangeMango 7y ago
> Now that I can see the code, I understand why the dev shop needed so many people working on it, and why all features were hard to do. It's because when you use a lot of mediocre programmers, they all create work for themselves and one another. Not intentionally, but just because they aren't able to see how the differing approaches and sloppy work slowly diminish productivity.
To me, that sounds like a leadership problem at the outside dev shop. Properly supervised, properly supported, and with reasonable deadlines, mediocre developers can provide extraordinary results per dollar spent on probably 80-90% of dev tasks.
- wpietri 7y agoI'm familiar with the theory, but I've never seen that actually happen. And really, that just shifts the problem. If you need really amazing managers and really amazing senior engineers to make it work, you now just have a different hiring problem. As well a robustness problem, in that choosing a senior person badly means the whole team can go off the cliff. Personally, I'd rather start with the amazing senior people, hire bright juniors, and mentor them into being amazing developers as well. As well as investing in tooling for non-developers. If a chunk of work is boring enough that a mediocre programmer can do it without risk (e.g., creating reports), it's perhaps boring enough that you can just enable the users (with, e.g., report builders).