Eight points for one team is two points for another team

I've started to form a belief[0] that large software projects in general are A Bad Idea. Whatever it is, if it requires more than a handful of people to build, it's probably for the greater good of everyone--the workers involved, the users, humanity in general, anyone-not-identifying-as-shareholders--that it not be done.

Software is the only thing I can think of where the input effort of creating it is completely divorced from the output work it can churn through. The right program at the right time, written in 10 minutes by just the right person, can save hundreds of years of otherwise manual labor.

There's a sort of sense that arithmetic got us out of the stone age, calculus fed the world, computer programming gave us the stars. That sort of power is far too important to imbue into corporations.

When you get a large group of people together, they start to think of themselves as Important. And when people think of themselves as Important, they start to think the work they do is Hard. And when they think the work they do is Hard, they start to think the software to help them do their work should be Complex. And none of it comes out of anything other than "we have a large group of people together."

Like, microkernel operating systems have a reputation for being slow based on early experiments with them from the 1980s. There are modern microkernel systems that are perfectly fast and efficient and yet people still think "monolith go brrrrrr" and not "all my software lives here" is the reason Linux is any good.

Like, I've seen people pitching blockchain-based solutions for municipal information and issue-reporting services, like anything beyond the most basic, not-completely-incompetent, traditional RDBMS is really necessary for such a project.

Like, there's a serious cohort of economists that think that the best way to handle social safety benefits is to just give them to everyone who asks, no questions asked, because otherwise the management of welfare benefits gets to be so expensive that it eclipses any potential savings against "fraud". And I'm inclined to believe them.

I see people talk about "there's no such thing as a 10x programmer". I think these people have been stuck in ossified institutions so long that they have no idea what it looks like to see a person fly. Cut away 90% of the currently employed software developers. Dissolve the Googles and Facebooks of the world. Don't replace them with anything. Leave us with the 10% of crafstpeople who can actually work through a problem on their own. And make them report directly to the C-suite. No more middle managers. No more grunt work of CRUD forms. If it can be done on paper than it's a waste of time to write software to do it.

[0] AKA this is a feeling, not something I've created a double-blind randomized trial to study, dear pedantic HN reader.

I.e., split and gather work so that you don't need to score them. Then you can still get some rough feel for capacity without the bother of sizing.

And if you do this, you shouldn't split hairs and be dogmatic.

Upper management think Scrum is the only way to do software engineering. It’s a management cult.

"Not living up to Agile" is one of its principals: "At regular intervals, the team reflects on how to become more effective, then tunes and adjusts its behaviour accordingly." That's not what we're talking about, though.

> Agile did not bother to anticipate that people would fall off of the path.

This isn't a case of falling off the path, it's a case of not even being on the same planet. Agile is written about the things you need to think about if developers don't have managers overseeing a project. The OP was talking about what managers are doing. They are at completely different ends of the spectrum.

If you want to use a religious analogy, this is like there being a religious leader preaching about God and a group of people who believe God doesn't exist. Logically, you wouldn't lump them together. They would be seen as distinct groups with opposing thoughts. Exactly how we treat this situation in a religious context: For example, Christianity and atheism.

Setting aside the Linux kernel, this is how Unix itself works, and one of the reasons it was successful.

I don’t agree that we should shut down all the “1x” developers though. I think everyone deserves to love their work and people will excel when given the chance. But throwing them against a massive monolith that takes years to understand is dead certain to make them feel stupid and go slow.