To All Businesspeople: Developers Need Space to Do Whatever They Want • Hacker News Board

Re: To All Businesspeople: Developers Need Space to Do Whatever They Want

#11

Post by mc3 » Mon, Dec 02, 2019, 4:45 AM UTC

shiftpgdn wrote: post #2

Unless you're a FAANG your company probably doesn't have the cash on hand to hire 2x as many developers as they need to let them "personally develop" on the clock.

The assumption is that developers, like bricklayers, can do a certain amount of work per hour, and hiring twice as many will get twice as much done.

One great idea well executed at a company could save the need for an entire team of developers from being hired to do some mundane maintenance shit ... such is the leverage from code.

Re: To All Businesspeople: Developers Need Space to Do Whatever They Want

#12

Post by frogperson » Mon, Dec 02, 2019, 5:51 PM UTC

I like to push the idea that software is like a garden. You plant your crops and hope to have a good harvest for a few years. You have to pull weeds and spay for bugs along the way. You can't just constantly plant new seeds constantly and ignore all the other work required for a successful harvest.

Re: To All Businesspeople: Developers Need Space to Do Whatever They Want

#13

Post by downerending » Mon, Dec 02, 2019, 7:08 PM UTC

9nGQluzmnq3M wrote: post #7

With that headline, I was expecting this to be satire. Put another way, is there any particular reason developers need this when other white-collar professionals don't? I'm sure most, say, doctors would love to have some space as well, since the medical field evolves as fast if not faster than computing.

Not sure, but some of the best code I ever wrote, and most beneficial to my employer, started as undirected side projects.

Often there's little opportunity when pushing directly against the brick wall of entrenched interests. But heading off on a tangent can produce wins that those interests aren't prepared to block.