> A single talented carpenter with an energetic but otherwise totally unskilled > helper can accomplish more in a shift than two talented carpenters together.

> A single talented carpenter with an energetic but otherwise totally unskilled > helper can accomplish more in a shift than two talented carpenters together. > If you don't have someone to run to the truck for nails, hold shit, move > ladders, etc. productivity suffers because your talent is wasting time on > menial tasks. But you are mistaken -- each of us (the software engineers) already has numerous helpers who fit this description perfectly. The only difference is that we don't call them "apprentices" -- we call them compilers, interpreters, build tools and the like. Probably the only term that is commonly used on both types of helpers is "git". Joking aside -- if you find yourself and your team spending too much time on menial tasks, you need to focus more on automating them. Of course, how much can be automated depends on how much hardware is involved in your work; as long as we're in software world, pretty much anything can be automated.