HN Explorer

Thought experiment: Imagine we limit all development teams to one

6 points by quelsolaar ↗ HN
A lot of software would not be possible. So then imagine what would we need to make it possible to develop the things we need by only one person. We would need better tools and lib's.

Now to develop these tools and lib's, we still cant use more then one person, so they in turn need tools and lib's to make that work feasible. Keep building tools until eventually each project can be done by the team of one.

Every time a task becomes too big for someone, we don't hire someone to join them in completing the task, we hire someone to build the infrastructure to make the task manageable by one again. Management by locating pain points. Software development doesn't scale, but tools do.

https://twitter.com/EskilSteenberg/status/1248473940827074560

4 comments

[ 4.3 ms ] story [ 20.3 ms ] thread
[deleted]
(comment deleted)
austincheney
> We would need better tools and lib's.

I disagree. It begs the question: How easy do you need it to be? That question isn’t rhetorical. Should it be reduced to a series of multiple choice questions or copy/paste?

If you want a one developer team provide solid, super precise, requirements with free warm meals and get out of the way.

sethammons
I value the diversity of thoughts, skills, and experiences on my team. How could any tooling you are envisioning learn and spread new ideas, catch issues that could arise due to a solid understanding of the other systems you are running alongside, or help know when to make the trade off between delivering value vs over engineering? Not to mention what to do about a project that will take just too long to get to market if only one person worked on it.
Jtsummers
> Management by locating pain points.

In a way, that's close to the concept behind theory of constraints. This idea pushes organizations towards the ideas in DevOps and extreme levels of automation.