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I’ll also add, “too many cooks in the kitchen from day one.” If you’re starting some ambitious new greenfield project at a company, IMO it’s best to start out w

by yashap 4y ago

I’ll also add, “too many cooks in the kitchen from day one.” If you’re starting some ambitious new greenfield project at a company, IMO it’s best to start out with a small team where you can make decisions quickly, and where everyone has a lot of accountability. Think 2-3 devs, maybe one product-y/manager-y person, and that’s it. When I’ve been on greenfield projects that have 10-20 people starting work on it all at the same time, it’s almost guaranteed to fail. Decisions will be slow/tedious, bureaucracy will arrive instantly, individual accountability will be nowhere to be found. With that being said, projects that get boatloads of ppl on day 1 are rarely bullshit projects, per-se. They tend to be good ideas, an important new project, just executed in a way that’s bound to fail.

kqr 4y ago
To extend on that: there needs to be a small set of cooks with their actual fingers in the broth (for various reasons including coordination and quick pivots) but that small group should probably consult a much larger group of kitchen staff and customers (read: potential users, collaborators, partners, etc) to figure out if they're going the right direction.
- yashap 4y ago
  Oh yeah, it’s definitely not about making decisions in isolation - do your research, talk to stakeholders, think them through! Anyone who is given decision making power, and uses that to just do whatever they like with minimal consideration/research/etc., needs to have that power removed. But I do think in the early stages of a project, the number of people ultimately making the decisions (and writing code) needs to be small. More people can be added later, if necessary, but in the early stages of a greenfield project the team must be small. I’ve been on projects where 10-20 people are thrown onto it before a line of code exists and it’s an absolute shit show: decisions take ages, devs are constantly stepping on each other’s toes and extremely unproductive, there’s no personal accountability, etc.

by yashap 4y ago

kqr 4y ago

To extend on that: there needs to be a small set of cooks with their actual fingers in the broth (for various reasons including coordination and quick pivots) but that small group should probably consult a much larger group of kitchen staff and customers (read: potential users, collaborators, partners, etc) to figure out if they're going the right direction.

yashap 4y ago
Oh yeah, it’s definitely not about making decisions in isolation - do your research, talk to stakeholders, think them through! Anyone who is given decision making power, and uses that to just do whatever they like with minimal consideration/research/etc., needs to have that power removed. But I do think in the early stages of a project, the number of people ultimately making the decisions (and writing code) needs to be small. More people can be added later, if necessary, but in the early stages of a greenfield project the team must be small. I’ve been on projects where 10-20 people are thrown onto it before a line of code exists and it’s an absolute shit show: decisions take ages, devs are constantly stepping on each other’s toes and extremely unproductive, there’s no personal accountability, etc.