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I am sympathetic to this viewpoint, but I realized how infeasible it is with this suggested use of Fred's obsessions: "quick and thorough code review". People l
by mannykannot 6y ago
I am sympathetic to this viewpoint, but I realized how infeasible it is with this suggested use of Fred's obsessions: "quick and thorough code review". People like Fred will never be quick in their review, but boy, will they be thorough! Everything presented for review will be rejected for being fundamentally the wrong way to do the job, as explained in great detail.
Similarly, "refactoring and managing tech debt" will become "rewrite from scratch", and "automating anything that can possibly be automated" and "streamlining the deploy process" will be inordinately parameterized in order to cover every possible (and hypothetical) edge case.
- KMag 6y agoNot all people like Fred will act as you describe. When I was at Google, Michael Chastain (I think he is/was a GDB maintainer) did lots of massive refactorings across the whole Google codebase, and was one of the hand full of people with ownership rights at the root of the source tree. He really was a major force multiplier.
- mannykannot 6y agoI don't know Michael Chastain, but I know people who fit your description, and, unlike the generic Fred of the article, they are not slow to deliver useful software - quite the opposite, in fact.