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How close are you to these guys? When you say "I've watched them build their own stack", are you referring to having read some blog posts, or do you know them p

by leoedin 13y ago

How close are you to these guys? When you say "I've watched them build their own stack", are you referring to having read some blog posts, or do you know them personally? The money that the fairly small team are spending is a drop in the ocean compared to many government funded projects. If you want to get angry about misspent public funds, I can think of countless other areas that are orders of magnitude worse. The reality is that a small team of people directly employed by the government working fairly effectively can build and discard their stack as many times as they want and still be significantly cheaper than getting a big company to do it.

csmithuk 13y ago
I watch github, I watch their blog, I read interviews, I get the picture. It's my job to look at dysfunctional teams both from a technology and a process perspective. I've seen teams like this many times before. They are expensive, inefficient and the return is considerably lower than the investment has promised. Just because the historic approaches are worse doesn't exclude these guys from scrutiny. They'll quite happily piss £40k of dev cost up the wall while other departments are arguing over £200 ultrasounds for cancer patients. Scrutiny must be universal and unforgiving.
- mattmanser 13y ago
  So long answer, short, you don't know. I've not been watching them closely, but they are delivering, which seems an extremely strong indication they're not dysfunctional at all. Every now and then I end up on a gov site they've redone and it's immediately obvious they've had at it because it's easy to use, responsive, etc. You're sounding like one of those pointy haired bosses that don't understand that good developers play to succeed, and it doesn't always pay off. But if you stop them you end up with crap because the good people leave.
  - code_not_curse 13y ago
    Got to say it sounds like you were pretty far away too, but the page loads quick so it is ok they redeveloped the stack with Ruby, Scala, Go, and when they get bored and want to learn Elixir or Erlang, maybe they rewrite it again. After all, it is only our taxes paying for it. Sounds more like a pointy haired boss to me.

by leoedin 13y ago

csmithuk 13y ago

I watch github, I watch their blog, I read interviews, I get the picture. It's my job to look at dysfunctional teams both from a technology and a process perspective. I've seen teams like this many times before. They are expensive, inefficient and the return is considerably lower than the investment has promised. Just because the historic approaches are worse doesn't exclude these guys from scrutiny. They'll quite happily piss £40k of dev cost up the wall while other departments are arguing over £200 ultrasounds for cancer patients. Scrutiny must be universal and unforgiving.

mattmanser 13y ago
So long answer, short, you don't know. I've not been watching them closely, but they are delivering, which seems an extremely strong indication they're not dysfunctional at all. Every now and then I end up on a gov site they've redone and it's immediately obvious they've had at it because it's easy to use, responsive, etc. You're sounding like one of those pointy haired bosses that don't understand that good developers play to succeed, and it doesn't always pay off. But if you stop them you end up with crap because the good people leave.
- code_not_curse 13y ago
  Got to say it sounds like you were pretty far away too, but the page loads quick so it is ok they redeveloped the stack with Ruby, Scala, Go, and when they get bored and want to learn Elixir or Erlang, maybe they rewrite it again. After all, it is only our taxes paying for it. Sounds more like a pointy haired boss to me.