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A really good developer can and will absolutely outpace a couple small teams of developers. The shortcomings is the domain knowledge is locked in one head. Yo
by tracker1 5y ago
A really good developer can and will absolutely outpace a couple small teams of developers. The shortcomings is the domain knowledge is locked in one head. You gain and lose a lot depending on how many people are involved and how much you have to communicate.
Not having a backup solution is probably the single biggest shortcoming of the lone gunman in practice. The second is that the code is often not laid out or structured so that a team can work on it.
- kragen 5y agoAs the MapReduce example shows, the domain knowledge is not necessarily locked in one head in cases like this. I haven't heard complaints from Googlers about how Jeff and Sanjay write unmaintainable code, either. My own non-Google experience is that extremely productive programmers tend to write code that's more readable, not less readable.