4 ms·

Could you say more about the team size? Taking a 2000-hour year as ballpark, 2500 hours in 9 months is puzzling to me. And as long as I have your attention, ho

Could you say more about the team size? Taking a 2000-hour year as ballpark, 2500 hours in 9 months is puzzling to me. And as long as I have your attention, how many releases happened during that period?

yamtaddle 4y ago
2500 hours in 9 months could be two developers logging hours on the project. The project may have had stretches when dependencies limited the amount of work that could be done, and often one assumes at least an hour of non-billable time lost to miscellaneous business shit, per IC, per day. The rest of the team (not logging engineering hours) may have included a (probably part-time) designer and likely some kind of project manager (likely also part-time—that is, managing 2+ projects at once for different clients). 7 (billable, on average) hours * 47 weeks (assuming 25 weekdays lost to holidays, sick days, and vacation, over a year) * 5 weekdays only yields 1,645 hours per worker per year, anyway. Divide by four, times three, to get ~9 months, and 2500 hours just looks like two full-timers on the project, really, if we're talking billable hours, but that's also (it reads like) not counting support roles and non-dev contributors like design or PM or maybe testers. Or it might be one full-time and two half-time devs, or whatever. I'd guess not more than four developers contributing significant time, anyway, based on the numbers and with fairly pessimistic assumptions for how many hours could be logged a week, and maybe as few as two.
komali2 4y ago
I'm rough on the math cause I don't have the billing sheets in front of me, but the other person was pretty close. The team I managed was me, functioning as frontend lead / architect / engineering manager as well as individual contributor. I then had three junior / early mid-level frontend engineers working with me. I was pulling 40-60 hour weeks (contract so I didn't mind, just meant more money), the other devs were between 10-40 depending on how much work I could lay out in a sprint. Timezones were Taiwan, somewhere in Europe can't exactly recall, NYC, and California iirc. That accounts for the frontend. There was a data system that was mostly built when I showed up, by one full time engineer at the startup. So that would be another 40 x 4 x 9 engineering hours on whatever he was working on in the meantime. Then there was an API that would middleman requests to the data system and build out models and handle customer accounts and shopping carts and other data adjacent requests. That was one full time backend engineer over whom I didn't have responsibility, so add another 40 x 4 x 9 for that. Finally, the designer was just the CEO. He would draw things up on figma and I'd slice them into frontend tickets. Now that I think about it I think the API engineer was consulting the same designs as he built out the API, I'm not remembering exactly. So technically my original estimate is just for the frontend, it cost more when considering the whole system. We "released" every merge into the main branch, internally. The CEO would constantly be giving feedback. It caused some friction occasionally, the classic "right the alignment is slightly off but what do you think about the actual interaction" type shoulder bumps, nothing major. Good feedback loop that basically daily aligned where I should be directing frontend priority. There was a major customer facing release where a couple core customers were brought off the no code platform onto the new system, that cooked for about two weeks while we collected feedback and engineered against it, then another major release where I took advantage of the respite to do a major rewrite of the naively implemented request management system and fixed up some auth stuff, then another big release and then everyone else is brought over. I still work a couple hours a week on the projecy but no longer as a leader. Looks like releases are still just kinda whenever, which I think is fine. There are "sprints" and have been the entire time but always quite informal.

yamtaddle 4y ago

2500 hours in 9 months could be two developers logging hours on the project. The project may have had stretches when dependencies limited the amount of work that could be done, and often one assumes at least an hour of non-billable time lost to miscellaneous business shit, per IC, per day. The rest of the team (not logging engineering hours) may have included a (probably part-time) designer and likely some kind of project manager (likely also part-time—that is, managing 2+ projects at once for different clients). 7 (billable, on average) hours * 47 weeks (assuming 25 weekdays lost to holidays, sick days, and vacation, over a year) * 5 weekdays only yields 1,645 hours per worker per year, anyway. Divide by four, times three, to get ~9 months, and 2500 hours just looks like two full-timers on the project, really, if we're talking billable hours, but that's also (it reads like) not counting support roles and non-dev contributors like design or PM or maybe testers. Or it might be one full-time and two half-time devs, or whatever. I'd guess not more than four developers contributing significant time, anyway, based on the numbers and with fairly pessimistic assumptions for how many hours could be logged a week, and maybe as few as two.

komali2 4y ago

I'm rough on the math cause I don't have the billing sheets in front of me, but the other person was pretty close. The team I managed was me, functioning as frontend lead / architect / engineering manager as well as individual contributor. I then had three junior / early mid-level frontend engineers working with me. I was pulling 40-60 hour weeks (contract so I didn't mind, just meant more money), the other devs were between 10-40 depending on how much work I could lay out in a sprint. Timezones were Taiwan, somewhere in Europe can't exactly recall, NYC, and California iirc. That accounts for the frontend. There was a data system that was mostly built when I showed up, by one full time engineer at the startup. So that would be another 40 x 4 x 9 engineering hours on whatever he was working on in the meantime. Then there was an API that would middleman requests to the data system and build out models and handle customer accounts and shopping carts and other data adjacent requests. That was one full time backend engineer over whom I didn't have responsibility, so add another 40 x 4 x 9 for that. Finally, the designer was just the CEO. He would draw things up on figma and I'd slice them into frontend tickets. Now that I think about it I think the API engineer was consulting the same designs as he built out the API, I'm not remembering exactly. So technically my original estimate is just for the frontend, it cost more when considering the whole system. We "released" every merge into the main branch, internally. The CEO would constantly be giving feedback. It caused some friction occasionally, the classic "right the alignment is slightly off but what do you think about the actual interaction" type shoulder bumps, nothing major. Good feedback loop that basically daily aligned where I should be directing frontend priority. There was a major customer facing release where a couple core customers were brought off the no code platform onto the new system, that cooked for about two weeks while we collected feedback and engineered against it, then another major release where I took advantage of the respite to do a major rewrite of the naively implemented request management system and fixed up some auth stuff, then another big release and then everyone else is brought over. I still work a couple hours a week on the projecy but no longer as a leader. Looks like releases are still just kinda whenever, which I think is fine. There are "sprints" and have been the entire time but always quite informal.