How Silicon Valley, in a Show of Monopolistic Force, Destroyed
https://t.co/C2om0SHgLb
We wrote a 200 page report on why corporate concentration - including the big tech radicalization engines - worsened under both Democratic and Republican administrations. It has to do with antitrust enforcement, and it's fixable by Biden. https://t.co/K85Kv34t83
— Matt Stoller (@matthewstoller) January 12, 2021
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Developer productivity, y'all. It is a three TRILLION dollar opportunity, per the stripe report.
Eng managers and directors, we have got to stop asking for "more headcount" and start treating this like the systems problem that it is. https://t.co/XJ0CkFdgiO
If you are getting barely more than 50% productivity out of your very expensive engineers, I can pretty much guarantee you cannot hire your way out of this resourcing issue. 😐
(the stripe report is here:
Say you've got a strategic initiative that 3 engineers to build and support it. Well, they're going to be swimming in the same muddy pipeline as everyone else at ~50%, so you're actually gotta source, hire and train 6, er make that 7 (gonna need another manager too now)...
...which actually understates the problem, because each person you add also adds friction and overhead to the system. Communication, coordination all get harder and processes get more complex and elaborate, etc.
So we could hire 7 people, or we could patch up our sociotechnical system to lose say only 25% productivity to tech debt, instead of 42%? 🤔
By my calculations, that would reclaim 3 engineers worth of capacity given a team of just 17-18 people.
Eng managers and directors, we have got to stop asking for "more headcount" and start treating this like the systems problem that it is. https://t.co/XJ0CkFdgiO

When people often have to spend weeks just to get a local development environment up, there is a lot to improve. \U0001f641
— Daniel Schildt (@autiomaa) December 20, 2020
If you are getting barely more than 50% productivity out of your very expensive engineers, I can pretty much guarantee you cannot hire your way out of this resourcing issue. 😐
(the stripe report is here:
Say you've got a strategic initiative that 3 engineers to build and support it. Well, they're going to be swimming in the same muddy pipeline as everyone else at ~50%, so you're actually gotta source, hire and train 6, er make that 7 (gonna need another manager too now)...
...which actually understates the problem, because each person you add also adds friction and overhead to the system. Communication, coordination all get harder and processes get more complex and elaborate, etc.
So we could hire 7 people, or we could patch up our sociotechnical system to lose say only 25% productivity to tech debt, instead of 42%? 🤔
By my calculations, that would reclaim 3 engineers worth of capacity given a team of just 17-18 people.