261–270 of 419 posts
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Not when I have done waterfall - each waterfall phase can iterate
Show me a Software Engineering book that calls Waterfall that can iterate "Waterfall" rather than "Spiral" or "Iterative".
"Waterfall" specifies the What while "Spiral and Iterative" specify the How.
I am a security engineer but have been a business leader from time to time. Business leaders often need to plan around dates- eg ”should we spend $50k announcing at conference Y in month Z, or should we wait until month A?” “Our competition just launched; will we be able to launch this quarter (the board wants to know, and we have to report material financial impact items quarterly or face SEC fines)?” Every team I h…
I'm speaking as someone who has handled a fair share of timelines (with reasonable success) you have pointed out. To begin with, it is interesting to see you lumping up different kinds of timelines. For example, the cost of not meeting SEC timeline different one compared to demo to be shown in a press conference. > should we spend $50k announcing at conference Y in month Z, or should we wait until month A? What is it…
That's not quite true: the inventions of mathematics, writing and especially affordable material to write on were probably even larger culture shifts, but software and computers are of the same magnitude - perhaps it's easier to realize the shift needed in corporate culture when you compare it to those earlier changes.
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I would say an approach closer to the Heisenberg uncertainty principle would make more sense. The more information specified that can't be changed about the expected product the less information is available about the deadline, ans vice versa. Thus, the desired balance could be used depending on the situation, goals, budget, etc.
That was briliant and is already added to my quotes list. Should I attribute it to xvilka or did you get it from somewhere else?
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People often forget that the 10x guy is 10x only in the domain he’s been working on, and many chores has been taken away from him by his manager and given to someone else. It is fairly easy to make a 10x someone closer to a 1x just by changing his tasks and giving more chores like CR, bug fixes, more mundane features or GUI etc. Sure it will often be better quality but in areas where it matters less.
Jeff Dean was 10x when he wrote EPI INFO, he was 10x when he worked on profilers at DEC WRL, he was 10x when he and Sanjay Ghemawat wrote MapReduce, and he was 10x when they rewrote Google's search indexer. Maybe 1000x or 10000x, really. It's true that part of that was that he worked on things that mattered instead of things that didn't, and he could have found himself in a situation where he didn't have that opportu…
Maybe you attract those like flies are attracted to honey, but pointing out that an Einstein existed isn't really helpful for approximately all teams of physicists out there, minus one or two teams
I'm not even saying there isn't a huge quality variance in the regular pool of programmers, mind you. Just that pointing out the existence of bad motherfuckers in a population of a few million people shouldn't come as a surprise.
With developers skipping boat every ~2 years on average how do you make sure you will keep such person in-house.
You can compensate people only up to some level but as they got bored or feel they can do something better with their time they will move. Not to mention family reasons or whatever else can happen in persons life. You can have talented dev today - next day he might be hit by a truck, if you run your business by relying on people you will be affected by such accidents, if you run your business as if everyone is interchangeable you won't. Even if they are not easily replaceable.
That "corporations are doing it wrong" premise is also wrong - somehow those big corporations are chugging along for decades. Of course they leave "lucky ticket" profits on the table, but that "lucky ticket" has risk of loss - which is missing from the text.
Yes with small focused team you can achieve great ROI in one off project but those are not projects that are done by big corporations. Then you have all the startups that usually fail.
Then leave alone "my friend's team was composed of people who had a track record of being highly effective across a variety of contexts" - seems like author does not understand how hard it is to find such people and assemble a team especially if you are BigCorp. That friend just got lucky to be in specific time and place and their experience. Especially if you read that they just wanted to hire another scapegoat - so it is just survivor-ship bias.
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strong disagree. there exist truths on a population level. oxycontin addicts traverse similar behavioral patterns, for example. for the worst of all cognitive biases i would say confirmation bias.
> there exists truths on a population level. I don't think the person you replied to was claiming otherwise. The problem is when one takes those population-level truths and blindly applies them to individuals. You might be right 80% of the time (or whatever) with that approach, but that doesn't help when you're wrong _this_ time with the specific person in front of you.
> You might be right 80% of the time
or, as in my example of a collective of oxycontin users, you might be able to predict certain of their actions at a 99% efficiency rate, and that may enable you to make statements that apply to the collective as a whole, and as individuals.
One thing that I always think is undervalued is how variable a single persons output is. A bad day, illness, life changes, etc all dramatically impact a person’s efficiency. Treating even the same persons output as abstract is fraught with issues. One month a rockstar the next a schlub.
One thing missing is that author is assuming that talented people will like to work in one place indefinitely. With developers skipping boat every ~2 years on average how do you make sure you will keep such person in-house. You can compensate people only up to some level but as they got bored or feel they can do something better with their time they will move. Not to mention family reasons or whatever else can happen…
Once you have market dominance it is really hard to lose it, you have more resources and more experience than any startup. So they can carry a lot of bad practices without failing as a company, they have to be really bad to lose their position.
This is actually a common business question, how can big well funded companies ever fall? Well, things like this is how they fall. Any one of these things wont be enough, but it all ads up.
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If you can replace an entire team of 10 engineers paid to work on something with a single engineer then that engineer is a 10x engineer, as long as the "10x engineer" didn't originally write the things they work with. That is my definition. > By the end of the day 10x is subjective because teams have different needs. Replacing 10 salaries with 1 salary isn't subjective at all.
So y’all don’t disagree with the main point. There are some specific individual engineers who will get a specific individual task, faster than some other specific engineers. If those same specific engineers get done many general tasks faster than another group of specific engineers on general tasks than they are just better in general. If some other specific task gets done by the other specific engineers better then…