3 ms·
It often strikes me as difficult to fathom that it took only a couple engineers a few months to build the MVP of the company I work for - that has since grown t
by Aqueous 3y ago
It often strikes me as difficult to fathom that it took only a couple engineers a few months to build the MVP of the company I work for - that has since grown to be a global, publicly traded corporation with many thousands of employees - but it somehow takes thousands of engineers multiple years to, in effect, build it again. In fact, it makes no sense whatsoever to me and can only be explained by how much time is thrown away, day after day, with all the busy work involved in prioritizing and coordinating their activity, and by the possibility that an awful lot of us are not contributing anything whatsoever. Is this incredibly wasteful utilization of labor really be the best way to do things? I cannot accept that it is. The coordination tax is simply too high. If people were just permitted to focus on something, anything, I feel the velocity of the entire organization would lift.
- cjcenizal 3y agoHow much of your company’s revenue is earned through that product? If it’s significant then the cost of introducing regressions in quality or functionality goes up. As companies grow and mistakes become more costly, they become more risk-averse and invest more resources into reducing risk. This slows things down and requires more people.
- Aqueous 3y agoVery good point - a huge chunk of the slowdown also comes from all the work around ensuring operational excellence. Monitoring, dashboards, testing, logging, CI. It's an incredible amount of labor to create production quality software on a continuous basis.
- yolovoe 3y agoDon't forget security updates, migrations, correctness and reliability. It's quick to get an MVP running that "mostly" works in the happy path. It's much more time consuming to get something that thoughtfully and correctly deals with most edge cases, and has some more 9s.