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As soon as your company grows, those who decide and define the activities are more and more not writing code anymore. Some activities/behaviours may still be i

As soon as your company grows, those who decide and define the activities are more and more not writing code anymore. Some activities/behaviours may still be injected at the developers’ level, but only if it does not contradict or impair what was defined as the main activity. So while, yes, developers may evolve in those roles where they will be in position to learn and understand what the company should do, and communicate it, and steer people to implement it (in code and other things), they won’t have much brain power left to read or write code. They will specialize in their new role and rely on other specialists.

lifeisstillgood 4y ago
My view is that 80% of the work done in a growing company is ... well it could be a simple black box (ie HR, payroll, even a lot of the hiring process etc etc). If SaaS companies had useful APIs and one could easily code over the top of them (which i guess is coming) we will see much "management" being amenable to coders the rest of the 20% matters - "culture", core competencies and so on. but strip out much of the busy work - have a "scalable company in a box" and just ask the founders to focus on the bits that really matter, and i think the brain space will be found
- Juliate 4y ago
  If you make hiring an outsourced black box, you might be surprised by the results. I understand this bias/will in the software industry to abstract things out of the physical/human world, but in the long run, what makes a company/business run is the people running it, not the tools/gears. If a company can be just founders alone, fine, why not, but it's not sustainable in the long run. If you need to hire and lead people for that purpose among others, software/APIs/implementations are a competitive advantage, but not what makes the business heart beat.
- imtringued 4y ago
  The hard part isn't building the black box, it's deciding what to put into the black box. I built a migration and I 99% knew that it was going to work, I spent one and a half hours doing a diff of the current state vs the migration and then spent 5 seconds clicking on the button on the black box to let it do its job.

lifeisstillgood 4y ago

My view is that 80% of the work done in a growing company is ... well it could be a simple black box (ie HR, payroll, even a lot of the hiring process etc etc). If SaaS companies had useful APIs and one could easily code over the top of them (which i guess is coming) we will see much "management" being amenable to coders the rest of the 20% matters - "culture", core competencies and so on. but strip out much of the busy work - have a "scalable company in a box" and just ask the founders to focus on the bits that really matter, and i think the brain space will be found

Juliate 4y ago
If you make hiring an outsourced black box, you might be surprised by the results. I understand this bias/will in the software industry to abstract things out of the physical/human world, but in the long run, what makes a company/business run is the people running it, not the tools/gears. If a company can be just founders alone, fine, why not, but it's not sustainable in the long run. If you need to hire and lead people for that purpose among others, software/APIs/implementations are a competitive advantage, but not what makes the business heart beat.
imtringued 4y ago
The hard part isn't building the black box, it's deciding what to put into the black box. I built a migration and I 99% knew that it was going to work, I spent one and a half hours doing a diff of the current state vs the migration and then spent 5 seconds clicking on the button on the black box to let it do its job.