SW development doesn't really scale.
Discussion
True, that's why the Unix principal say's, one feature one binary and follow the KISS (keep it short and stupid) principal.
Agree, but I meant more the group.
It's basically the opposite of scaling, that's why gotta be few and full stacks
Yeah, that's the thing. Quality just absolutely pulverizes quantity, in software dev. I've never seen any core dev group really scale well beyond 5 people and there's always just one full-Bob.
We got one full-Bob, two half-Bobs and an auxiliary-Bob, and we all mostly run in front of Bob, moving the shovels and marking out places he can dig and cleaning up afterward and surveying the ditch, and it's like an assembly line.
I bet that adding a second Bob would just slow stuff down. Everyone just needs to line up and make sure Bob's shovels never run out. 🤣
Make sure Bob has enough beer and sammiches.
I didn't even know that there was anything other than full-stack developers, until a few years ago. That used to just be "developers".
I think it's just a way of saying, "don't want to work on that, I am a (something) developer only". Eventually it goes all the way up and down the stack. I am from the era of "full stack" being called out as a specialty, capable of any language or concept in the stack, but maybe it's not a word anymore.. 😂
I can understand, when code is passion, and consuming your soul, most can only do it on the same project for 2 years, and then they either go to another project(I recommend this), or they continue at the current project with a bunch of reasons and meetings about why things don't need to happen.
Yeah. When I was starting out, everyone just did whatever, but the stack was thinner and simpler.
i just refuse to work on a project that doesn't let me focus on what i'm good at
you throw people into generalist tasks you get a mediocre result, every time
this is precisely the architectural and marketing problem of the web browser stack as a whole... too complex, too many edge cases, too many vulnerabilities and too many unhappy customers and too many unhappy dev/corporate users
specialising is an optimisation for many areas, and it's why being ambivalent and wishy washy gets you nowhere in life, in the long run
Ya I think it's prob driven by stupid salary type thinking. It's better to have people work on projects organized in a way that they can do what they're good at and pay them for their time in Bitcoin so they are not tied down or slowed down by heaps of other stuff.. *someone must keep the full stack in their brain though to be able to organize these efforts.
I look forward to the return of contracting.. silicon valley killed it in favor of exploitative practices.
i've got some big tasks ahead of me and we have this cute ukrainian PM on our case but it's me and my apprentice and honestly we have like maybe 8 tasks to do in total and we really don't need her
but it is exemplary of the mentality of tech in general... throwing a thousand darts in the general direction of the dartboard is gonna get at least one bulls eye, probably, but that's a hella expensive bullseye
better to just throw one at a time and focus and your dart thrower will be hitting the bulls-eye every other time consistently
Ya, the 'traditional' structure most companies seem to gravitate towards has PMs (product, AND project) in a role they are unsuited for and un-supported by a very needed full-stacker. Usually leads to a mess and disgruntled devs. Better to make tech decisions where PM is only one of the inputs, and other inputs include making good decisions on trajectory of the software itself and other factors.
I think AI helps with that. Whenever I need something my AI writes me a mini web app for it.
Our developers use AI. But using AI is also a learned skill that few people have.
I also think theres an underappreciated amount of nonverbal communication that happens amongst a developmet team, that AI can't really incorporate (yet?). Tbere's a gap between the rigor of coding & the ambiguity of english which doesn't exist as much with chatbots
The larger the team, the harder it gets to fill that gap IME. AI makes me persinally more efficient when coding, kind of, but that's it so far. I may just not be using it to it's potential
Modern IDEs and libraries are already so good that AI doesn't actually add as much as you would think. Mostly makes typing faster or auto-generates the docs.
If anything, AI is turning Bob into SuperBob because he can train his own AI.