He starts with this misleading premise, which sends everything in the wrong direction: > The software developer defence is that every software development task

He starts with this misleading premise, which sends everything in the wrong direction: > The software developer defence is that every software development task is doing something new, but this isn’t really true, most software development is actually fairly routine, and the problem isn’t specific to software development. I’ve worked on teams where most tasks were routine and they did a lot of accurate estimation. These were the worst teams in terms of value delivered to the organization. Lots of headcount, cranking out lots of diffs, closing lots of Jira tickets, very little innovation. Management loves this kind of team because the output seems measurable. The best teams focused on the velocity of the organization as a whole. Instead of making other teams file tickets to have us do routine tasks, we build a platform so they can do the tasks themselves. We look unproductive sitting on our thumbs after the platform is built, but around us everyone else is getting things done much faster. In this working style, every task really is novel, because once we solve it, it’s solved more-or-less permanently for everyone. And the estimates suck, but things work better overall.