You are not Google. You are not Netflix

What's up with the title?

I worked on the floor with two teams. One (ours) built our apps and infrastructure the correct way. JIT. Get it working, get it working correct, get it working fast. And given the scale, it did wonders.

The other team talked big and gave demos to higher ups and their higher ups and their higher ups. Web scale baby. And with that came the galactic infrastructure and all the buzzword needed in order to run it.

About 6 months later, they quit. They had spent their whole budget on astronaut architecture, that the didn't have any money or time left to build the apps that were supposed to run on said infrastructure.

"You are not FANG". But even if you are, JIT development.

> A developer’s skill is measured in one parameter: how well he writes code.

While this could be a valid viewpoint, one thing I’d caution against is that this type of measurement inevitably leads to the commoditization of developers. Rating skill on a single point will lead to “you’re only worth what this metric says you are worth” and eventually to constant competition between developers instead of cooperation. At least that’s the experience I had in such positions during my younger years.

A related issue is also focusing so much on the tech (and often how well the product/service can scale) that you forget to do much marketing and end up delaying the product/service for months as a result. Or worse still, never actually finish building it at all.

Definitely follow the old get it working, then correct, then fast methodology, at least for projects without many billions of dollars in resources.

I haven't heard it either, but apparently it's another name for the Toyota system/'lean manufacturing': https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Just-in-time_manufacturing