It's called Brook's Law. It takes a lot of time and effort getting people up to speed, and that takes experienced devs away from coding. You also have to get them credentialed, teach them the tools, need extra code reviews/testing/bugfixes while they learn the quirks and pitfalls of the code base, etc. In the long term you'll be able to get more done, but it comes at the cost of short term agility.
but it comes at the cost of short term agility
Often long-term agility, as well.
Big teams are faster on straightaways. Small teams go through the corners better. Upgrading from a go-kart to a dragster may just send your project 200mph into a wall. Sometimes a go-kart is really what you need.
I just wanted to say I loved your analogy.
Some go karts have 2 seats and that's ok.
โWhat one programmer can do in one month, two programmers can do in two months.โ
Yeah, it happens everywhere, all the time. And the main cause of it is, surprise surprise, people who have no technical understanding of the subject matter.
Currently in a project, where for strategic and unrelated reasons, we ended up with 4 new juniors and had to hand off one senior. In a team that consisted of merely 3 people before.
So, it's just me and another guy having to constantly juggle these juniors to push them back into the right direction and review whatever code they ended up with.
It's so frustrating, because while I'll gladly pass on my knowledge, the project has basically ground to a halt.
There's so many tasks me and the other senior would like to just quickly tackle. Which should just take a few days, no big deal. Oh no, I rarely get a day's worth of work done in two weeks. The rest is just looking after the juniors, who cannot tackle many of the actual crucial tasks.
And it's not even like the juniors are doing a bad job. Frankly, they're doing amazingly for how little support we can give them. But that doesn't stop the project from falling apart.
This, except for bullshit credentials.
Maybe "credentialed" wasn't the right word. I was thinking of software licenses and access to third party tools and systems. Probably not as big a mess in game dev as it is in government.
You mean you didn't enjoy sitting there when your thumb up your ass while you wait 6 months for a background check and another 6 months to get your GFE? Crazy!
It's called Brook's Law. It takes a lot of time and effort getting people up to speed, and that takes experienced devs away from coding. You also have to get them credentialed, teach them the tools, need extra code reviews/testing/bugfixes while they learn the quirks and pitfalls of the code base, etc. In the long term you'll be able to get more done, but it comes at the cost of short term agility.
Often long-term agility, as well.
Big teams are faster on straightaways. Small teams go through the corners better. Upgrading from a go-kart to a dragster may just send your project 200mph into a wall. Sometimes a go-kart is really what you need.
I just wanted to say I loved your analogy.
Some go karts have 2 seats and that's ok.
โWhat one programmer can do in one month, two programmers can do in two months.โ
Yeah, it happens everywhere, all the time. And the main cause of it is, surprise surprise, people who have no technical understanding of the subject matter.
Currently in a project, where for strategic and unrelated reasons, we ended up with 4 new juniors and had to hand off one senior. In a team that consisted of merely 3 people before.
So, it's just me and another guy having to constantly juggle these juniors to push them back into the right direction and review whatever code they ended up with.
It's so frustrating, because while I'll gladly pass on my knowledge, the project has basically ground to a halt.
There's so many tasks me and the other senior would like to just quickly tackle. Which should just take a few days, no big deal. Oh no, I rarely get a day's worth of work done in two weeks. The rest is just looking after the juniors, who cannot tackle many of the actual crucial tasks.
And it's not even like the juniors are doing a bad job. Frankly, they're doing amazingly for how little support we can give them. But that doesn't stop the project from falling apart.
This, except for bullshit credentials.
Maybe "credentialed" wasn't the right word. I was thinking of software licenses and access to third party tools and systems. Probably not as big a mess in game dev as it is in government.
You mean you didn't enjoy sitting there when your thumb up your ass while you wait 6 months for a background check and another 6 months to get your GFE? Crazy!