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I used to think that way, until I had my own junior developers, and felt like that guy trying to bake a cake with three beagles: They veer off, constantly, in a

by 9dev 2y ago

I used to think that way, until I had my own junior developers, and felt like that guy trying to bake a cake with three beagles: They veer off, constantly, in all directions. Developers deep in the trenches tend to have a bad feeling for business requirements or constraints; coupled with a knack for perfectionism and premature optimisation, that really often results in ridiculous time frames that are just plain unrealistic and would ruin the organisation long term. I don’t have any profound insights, though: The only sane mantra can be keeping things in balance. Too much management, you drive your devs insane; too much engineer control, and the architecture astronauts reinvent the wheel every other day.

strken 2y ago
It's hard to tell whether perfectionism means doing a pointless refactor to cloud microservice event-driven k8s buzzword Rust WASM-on-the-server sharded graph databases, or whether it means spending 30 minutes putting a password on that MongoDB instance your data science team wants to load prod data into.
- 9dev 2y ago
  Yeah, exactly. That’s why you want a culture of collaboration between engineers and managers to come together and decide what is important. It’s just hard to keep that up in practice, especially if a company grows.
happymellon 2y ago
> Developers deep in the trenches tend to have a bad feeling for business requirements In my experience, this is because the developers are removed from interacting with the business. How are they supposed to make good decisions if they don't talk to their customers and understand what they are aiming for? And I don't mean have the business folks show a roadmap once a year.
- 9dev 2y ago
  I wasn’t assigning blame here, but rather preaching the virtues of balancing the interests of engineering and business folks.
mondrian 2y ago
> They veer off, constantly, in all directions. I have a similar opinion of being micromanaged. The micromanager is like a chaos demon that keeps pointing me in random directions. I lose all internal vision / intuition and turn into an unhappy task robot.

by 9dev 2y ago

strken 2y ago

It's hard to tell whether perfectionism means doing a pointless refactor to cloud microservice event-driven k8s buzzword Rust WASM-on-the-server sharded graph databases, or whether it means spending 30 minutes putting a password on that MongoDB instance your data science team wants to load prod data into.

9dev 2y ago
Yeah, exactly. That’s why you want a culture of collaboration between engineers and managers to come together and decide what is important. It’s just hard to keep that up in practice, especially if a company grows.

happymellon 2y ago

> Developers deep in the trenches tend to have a bad feeling for business requirements In my experience, this is because the developers are removed from interacting with the business. How are they supposed to make good decisions if they don't talk to their customers and understand what they are aiming for? And I don't mean have the business folks show a roadmap once a year.

9dev 2y ago
I wasn’t assigning blame here, but rather preaching the virtues of balancing the interests of engineering and business folks.

mondrian 2y ago

> They veer off, constantly, in all directions. I have a similar opinion of being micromanaged. The micromanager is like a chaos demon that keeps pointing me in random directions. I lose all internal vision / intuition and turn into an unhappy task robot.