Write less code, be more responsible

Haha, this is exactly my experience.

I'll never forget the best candidate I ever interviewed - my feedback was to absolutely hire him and put him on the most interesting and challenging problems. They put him in a marketing team tweaking upsell popups. He left after 2 months.

I've been doing this for 30-years and this is another political slogan of sorts. this is true in every single imaginable job - new people slow you down, until they do not and become part of the well-oiled machine that is hopefully your team. not sure why people insist on saying this, it is like saying "read this book, says that that Sun will rise tomorrow morning"

> I’ve seen it time and again: startups move from their market-fit phase into an operational excellence phase on the backing of VC funding and they start hiring a ton of people. Most of those developers are highly educated, specialized people with deep technical skills and they’re often put to work making the boxes more blue or sitting in meetings with PMs for hours. Teams slow down output when you add more people.

I wasn't talking about startups or developers making boxes more blue, I was talking about personal experience. The bottleneck, if you are doing amazing shit and not burning some billionaries money on some silly "startup" is always the code which is why we hire developers to write the code. Everything else is just coming up with some silly unrelated examples - of course there are people (at every job again) doing nothing or menial tasks - this isn't what I was talking about.

> You don’t have a quota. It’s not like you’ll have fewer units to sell if you don’t add that 30k lines of code by Friday.

I do have customers that want features that would make their lives easier and are willing to handsomely pay for it, that good enough?

> This is knowledge work. The work is understanding problems and knowing how to develop solutions to them. You add more people and you end up adding overhead. Communication, co-ordination, operations overhead.

This is only on super shitty teams with super shitty co-workers (especially senior ones) and super shitty managers. I feel for the careers in this industry where this is/was the case. A whole lot of people are terrible at their jobs in places like this - a whole lot of people...

> A well-sized team that has worked together a long time can outperform a massive team any day in my experience.

a well-sized team was at one point (well-sized team - 1) and (well-sized team - 2) and (well-sized team - 3) and in the future if it is right team will be even more amazing as well (well-sized team + 1), (well-sized team + 2)

There are still consequences, however. Even with an agent, development slows, cost increases, bugs emerge at a higher rate, etc. It's still beneficial to focus on code quality instead of raw output. I don't think this is limited writing it yourself, mind - but you need to actually have an understanding of what's being generated so you can critique and improve it.

Personally, I've found the accessibility aspect to be the most beneficial. I'm not always writing more code, but I can do much more of it on my phone, just prompting the agent, which has been so freeing. I don't feel this is talked about enough!

I’m talking from personal experience of well over twenty years as both a developer, and for a while, a manager.

The slow part isn’t writing code.

It’s shipping it. You can have every one vibe coding until their eyes bleed and you’ve drained their will to live. The slowest part will still be testing, verifying, releasing, and maintaining the ball of technical debt that’s been accumulating. You will still have to figure out what to ship, what to fix, what to rush out and what to hold out until it’s right, etc. The more people you have to slower that goes in my experience. AI tools don’t make that part faster.