I’m so sick of this “moving fast” mindset. The result of which is my newsletter being full of security hole and hacked.
What matters is how fast the team can collectively write, test, review, ship, maintain, refactor, extend, architect, and revise the software that they own.
Ah, really? Are you sure that’s what matters?
I’m bragging when I say this: A decade ago, I rewrote an indecipherable mess of code into an elegant and transparent procedure, nestled comfortably inside every sanity/insanity check I could think of for the situation. Today, that code (aside from an update for a vulnerable dependency) is still running just the way I wrote it.
Releases should be fast and rare.
Moving fast doesn’t have to mean poor workmanship.
To make an analogy, if you want to be able to make a cup of coffee fast, you need to make sure that the coffee beans, the water, and the brewer are all near each other, that there is electricity and that the water is running. These are all things that enable you to move fast, but they don’t decrease quality, if anything they increase quality because you aren’t wasting time and effort tackling obstacles unrelated to brewing.
Which is in fact the point of the article. That you should make sure you have a good development environment, with support systems and processes, so that you can work effectively even if your developers are not savants. Rather than trying to hire people who are good enough to do a decent job even in the worst environments.
I won’t read the article now, but
arguing that true productivity lies in team performance, not individual brilliance
this is bullshit, a categorical statement.
There are good processes and there are bad processes. Good processes are usually functional for people of (sensibly) different mindsets and mental conditions. Bad processes are usually “one size fits all” in one way or another.
There are things a team can’t have, and there are things a talented individual can’t have.
There’s also experience that covers holes one can’t plan for, yep.
LIES! It’s us unstable ones that carry EVERYTHING!