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> Turn one dev loose, no distractions, and you can get amazing results. Yes... or, horrifying results. Or something in between. Your model is overfitted to yo

> Turn one dev loose, no distractions, and you can get amazing results. Yes... or, horrifying results. Or something in between. Your model is overfitted to your personal experience. Your take is going to resonate with devs who have had bad agile-ish experiences, and for sure there are plenty of those. But the lone-developer mythos also resonates with devs who've been burned on stupid teams. You're mixing those two things together here, but agile and lone-coder are not opposites. If you're sincerely wincing about adding more team members without clear roles, then I hope that someday you experience the joy of working on a high-performing, self-directed development team. They exist; many of them even follow agile processes. Some of them work in enterprise settings. Sometimes you just have bad managers, or bad team members, and no buzzword methodology is going to dig you out of that hole.

brailsafe 3y ago
> Sometimes you just have bad managers, or bad team members, and no buzzword methodology is going to dig you out of that hole. Very true, but the common theme among bad managers at shit companies is that they always try and fix that problem by buying a new methodology with a buzzword attached to it, reward themselves for having done so, and never reflect on whether anyone's done anything effectively by the time they get a new one. The lone-developer and the self-directed team mythos' share the common element that they've figured out how to tangle with any real logistical problems they actually have by analyzing them, reflecting on how to do better, and using communication, rather than imagining what problems they have, externalizing the solution with an off-the-shelf template, and identifying how much praise they'll get from anyone but those doing the work regardless of whether the non-plan works.
datavirtue 3y ago
My model is overfitted to senior devs with domain knowledge. I was going to hire a junior dev or two until I started talking with copilot all day. Greased lightening. The hiring process alone would cost us more than their first year salary. Going to avoid it as much as I can.
- gmfawcett 3y ago
  > My model is overfitted to senior devs with domain knowledge. As a former senior dev (with domain knowledge!), I politely disagree, this model doesn't fit my experience at all.

brailsafe 3y ago

> Sometimes you just have bad managers, or bad team members, and no buzzword methodology is going to dig you out of that hole. Very true, but the common theme among bad managers at shit companies is that they always try and fix that problem by buying a new methodology with a buzzword attached to it, reward themselves for having done so, and never reflect on whether anyone's done anything effectively by the time they get a new one. The lone-developer and the self-directed team mythos' share the common element that they've figured out how to tangle with any real logistical problems they actually have by analyzing them, reflecting on how to do better, and using communication, rather than imagining what problems they have, externalizing the solution with an off-the-shelf template, and identifying how much praise they'll get from anyone but those doing the work regardless of whether the non-plan works.

datavirtue 3y ago

My model is overfitted to senior devs with domain knowledge. I was going to hire a junior dev or two until I started talking with copilot all day. Greased lightening. The hiring process alone would cost us more than their first year salary. Going to avoid it as much as I can.

gmfawcett 3y ago
> My model is overfitted to senior devs with domain knowledge. As a former senior dev (with domain knowledge!), I politely disagree, this model doesn't fit my experience at all.