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I've come to a pragmatic conclusion about this problem: When an organization becomes very large, serious individual compromises for the sake of organizational

I've come to a pragmatic conclusion about this problem: When an organization becomes very large, serious individual compromises for the sake of organizational effeciency become necessary. These compromises happen for the sake of allowing teams interact with hundreds or thousands of other developers to produce a large product (often at the oversight of a nontechnical executive). This is a serious turnoff to star workers who are self confident and prefer to do things their own way. Said star workers know their own worth and would prefer to work on their own terms again sans constant individual compromise, so they leave. Mediocre programmers, lacking the confidence to leave, have a much larger threshold for such individual compromises for the sake of the organization. So they stay.

DrStalker 15y ago
There comes a point where having a few exceptional programmers is no longer enough to deliver a project, so more and more process starts getting wrapped around the software life-cycle to manage the larger team. Striking a balance between enough process to keep everything on track and allow PMS to make predictions about the project timeline while not stifling your best programmers with a system they end up working against is not an easy task.
- Domenic_S 15y ago
  If I'm a homebuilder and in my crew I have 5 average-ability builders and one exceptional tile guy, I can't be expected to let the tile guy run the show. I might treat him differently -- give him plans and let him run with them, let him be responsible for meeting his own deadlines and so forth, but in no circumstance can I let that tile guy have total free reign over a home project... and in all honesty, he probably doesn't want it. I'm not sure the analogy works, but this was my struggle moving from startups to enterprise environments. Personal contribution matters, but there can be no heroes, because the totality of the business is immense. This thinking requires a bit of abstraction on the business side and coming to terms with the fact that you're a member of a team (and there are many other teams all with different relative importance). A cog in the machine? Perhaps, but a startup is just a tiny machine, and when you scale, as is the nature of a successful startup, you do so by adding cogs and thus increasing the size of your machine. I firmly believe that process doesn't really keep things "on track" as much as it forces the business the choose between competing priorities, and it forces communication. It doesn't matter if it's Agile, XP, whatever -- you need three things for process to work: 1) defined owners with the authority to set priorities, 2) defined intervals when those priorities can't be changed, and 3) agreement between the involved parties that they'll stick to the process.
  - fijal 15y ago
    that's the point - the analogy does not work. A difference in performance between an average worker and an exceptional one is not very large. The difference between an average programmer and a good one can be between having or not having stuff working. Precisely because of worker analogy, people leave.
acerimmer 15y ago
Big corporations' ineffeciency is also caused by this: Departments that are not profitable can survive. If they were separate companies they would go bacckrupt. The free market "Only the fittest survive" motto doesn't apply to them. This is also the main reason why most state-run oranizations are ineffecient.

DrStalker 15y ago

There comes a point where having a few exceptional programmers is no longer enough to deliver a project, so more and more process starts getting wrapped around the software life-cycle to manage the larger team. Striking a balance between enough process to keep everything on track and allow PMS to make predictions about the project timeline while not stifling your best programmers with a system they end up working against is not an easy task.

Domenic_S 15y ago
If I'm a homebuilder and in my crew I have 5 average-ability builders and one exceptional tile guy, I can't be expected to let the tile guy run the show. I might treat him differently -- give him plans and let him run with them, let him be responsible for meeting his own deadlines and so forth, but in no circumstance can I let that tile guy have total free reign over a home project... and in all honesty, he probably doesn't want it. I'm not sure the analogy works, but this was my struggle moving from startups to enterprise environments. Personal contribution matters, but there can be no heroes, because the totality of the business is immense. This thinking requires a bit of abstraction on the business side and coming to terms with the fact that you're a member of a team (and there are many other teams all with different relative importance). A cog in the machine? Perhaps, but a startup is just a tiny machine, and when you scale, as is the nature of a successful startup, you do so by adding cogs and thus increasing the size of your machine. I firmly believe that process doesn't really keep things "on track" as much as it forces the business the choose between competing priorities, and it forces communication. It doesn't matter if it's Agile, XP, whatever -- you need three things for process to work: 1) defined owners with the authority to set priorities, 2) defined intervals when those priorities can't be changed, and 3) agreement between the involved parties that they'll stick to the process.
- fijal 15y ago
  that's the point - the analogy does not work. A difference in performance between an average worker and an exceptional one is not very large. The difference between an average programmer and a good one can be between having or not having stuff working. Precisely because of worker analogy, people leave.

acerimmer 15y ago

Big corporations' ineffeciency is also caused by this: Departments that are not profitable can survive. If they were separate companies they would go bacckrupt. The free market "Only the fittest survive" motto doesn't apply to them. This is also the main reason why most state-run oranizations are ineffecient.