Team productivity
Published in
2 min readAug 5, 2019
“What one programmer can do in one month, two programmers can do in two months.”
— Fred Brooks“Adding manpower to a late software project makes it later.”
— Fred Brooks
Some companies hire more people to increase productivity.
The approach for hiring might be different, and in one of them company wants the most senior people in the team. But what I learned from experience — people tendt to have opinions, and opinions are harder for more senior people. As a consequence, if you have 2 or 3 people of the same level in the team — the endless argument guaranteed.
Yesterday I’ve heard a story about 12 (twelve!) developers working on a simple feedback form, constantly arguing and coming up with shity compromise, which satisfies no-one.
Possible solutions
- Leave one person of a kind for the project (one ops, one backend dev, one frontend dev), so they will have no option to argue. Brooks muses that “good” programmers are generally five to ten times as productive as mediocre ones. And only when one, let’s say backend dev, cannot make it — we can hire a free-lancer which gonna do what he’s been told, without extra arguments.
- Make the most productive/responsible/experienced person a CTO, so the last word will be on him/her and the endless argument will end.
- Technological perfection. The modern practices of continuous integration, test-driven development, and iterative development significantly reduce the inter-developer communication overhead, and thus allow for better scalability.
