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This isn't super related, but the unexpected complication I've run into as I've tried to scale my team is that nobody has the knowledge I have, so I've got to s

This isn't super related, but the unexpected complication I've run into as I've tried to scale my team is that nobody has the knowledge I have, so I've got to spend most of my time showing folks how to do the work. The problem here is that if I'm not being productive (I'm teaching), and the other devs are not being productive (they don't know the domain), then nobody is productive. You'd think that'd level out eventually as the other devs grow, but on short runways, there really isn't time for that. However, we can't hire devs who know the domain because a) they're not looking for jobs and b) the ones who are we can't afford. So it's just me, teaching other devs, when I could/should be pounding out code so we can get a few more sales, which will justify the next round. Unintuitively, it probably didn't make sense to hire anyone else, but that feels weird because then it's just me in a dark room churning out code nobody's reviewed, and there really is plenty of work to do, it's just all work only I seem to be able to do. I assume this is standard for early stage startups who haven't yet found their P/M fit, but it is odd.

molsongolden 4y ago
Is the specialized knowledge company-related, tech stack complexity, or customer domain expertise? There's never a clear blueprint but a couple of ways to tackle various flavors of this problem: * Pair a good engineer with a non-engineer domain expert and let them teach each other as they ideate and build. * Scope down the projects instead of scaling up the team. Without P/M fit, the team might need to focus their energy and get initial traction solving one aspect of the customer problem. * Scrap any tech stack complexity and go full hackathon-mode until something clicks.
beliu 4y ago
This is super common in my experience. Senior/experienced devs spend a bunch of time ramping up the inexperienced or new members of the team and don't have much time remaining to work on their own initiatives. Patrick McKenzie has a good take on this along the lines of "teach someone to fish" (s/fish/code search/): https://mobile.twitter.com/patio11/status/1086111513671217152 https://mobile.twitter.com/patio11/status/108611151367121715... We've tried to make it easier to turn organic code explorations into interactive docs that can be read many times over with a notebook-like feature. Here's a notebook that bobheadxi wrote up after he noticed he was explaining Sourcegraph's authz model for the billionth time: https://sourcegraph.com/notebooks/Tm90ZWJvb2s6NTc0 https://sourcegraph.com/notebooks/Tm90ZWJvb2s6NTc0

molsongolden 4y ago

Is the specialized knowledge company-related, tech stack complexity, or customer domain expertise? There's never a clear blueprint but a couple of ways to tackle various flavors of this problem: * Pair a good engineer with a non-engineer domain expert and let them teach each other as they ideate and build. * Scope down the projects instead of scaling up the team. Without P/M fit, the team might need to focus their energy and get initial traction solving one aspect of the customer problem. * Scrap any tech stack complexity and go full hackathon-mode until something clicks.

beliu 4y ago

This is super common in my experience. Senior/experienced devs spend a bunch of time ramping up the inexperienced or new members of the team and don't have much time remaining to work on their own initiatives. Patrick McKenzie has a good take on this along the lines of "teach someone to fish" (s/fish/code search/): https://mobile.twitter.com/patio11/status/1086111513671217152 https://mobile.twitter.com/patio11/status/108611151367121715... We've tried to make it easier to turn organic code explorations into interactive docs that can be read many times over with a notebook-like feature. Here's a notebook that bobheadxi wrote up after he noticed he was explaining Sourcegraph's authz model for the billionth time: https://sourcegraph.com/notebooks/Tm90ZWJvb2s6NTc0 https://sourcegraph.com/notebooks/Tm90ZWJvb2s6NTc0