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I once worked in a department of a fortune 50 which did not have seemingly any need to produce profit or in practice ship any software. Every design came down
by lumost 5y ago
I once worked in a department of a fortune 50 which did not have seemingly any need to produce profit or in practice ship any software. Every design came down to debating why don't you do x, for every value of x that the team could come up with.
This lead to the pathological condition whereby adding engineers to the team slowed progress, as it simply created more values for x.
- uluyol 5y ago"Not worth it, at least right now" is a perfectly valid answer to this question. Before doing X, someone needs to estimate the benefits of doing it / the costs of not doing it. If there's no clear reason to do X, but there are clear reasons to do Y, then forget X and do Y. If things change and a reason for X appears, then you do X.
- lumost 5y agoNot worth it, at least right now according to what metric? This can be interpreted as a dismissive answer to a colleague. It also presumes that the owner of the project has both full autonomy over the implementation, outcome and the perception of the outcome. If you piss off enough people over the course of a 6 month to a year project, it's unlikely that the perception of even a game changing win will be positive. As most large companies base promotions off of feedback, pissing off the wrong people will also block development. When you see tenured members of a team exhibiting certain behaviors, it's often due to those behaviors optimally solving for the incentives of the organization.
- hbrav 5y agoPerhaps a previously un-noticed reason for Brooks' Law being true...