Comment by evidencetamper
19 hours ago
Excellent comment. What you raised are two important aspects of the analysis that the article didn't bother thinking about:
- how to best leverage the team you currently have
- what is the most likely shape your team will have in the future
Jane Street has enough resources and experts to be able to train developers on OCaml, Nubank and Clojure also comes to mind. If one leaves, the impact is not devastating. Hiring is not straightforward, but they are able to hire engineers willing to learn and train them.
This is not true for a lot of places, that have tighter teams and budgets, whose product is less specialized, and so on.
But this is where the article fails and your comment succeeds: actually setting out parameters to establish a strategy.
Most of the engineering advice tries to be as general as possible.
The issue is nothing is general in software. What a solo dev, a 10 person startup and a FAANG should do are 3 different things.
For example, a hobbyist dev who spends all day writing unit tests and calculating their own points in Jira, that doesn't make sense.
But I'd be horrified to see the same dev not use any task tracking at all at work.
For myself I take long breaks on my side projects, particularly when it comes to boring stuff like authentication.
If course I can't do that at my full time job. I can't just stop and do something else.
Jane Street is making billions in revenue per year and all their software needs to be as optimized as possible. If making the software 1% better nets you another 100 million dollars, you can hire a dozen people to specifically write internal tooling to make it happen.
Verses a smaller team probably just has to be do with off the shelf solutions .
The other thing this article misses is this is going to drastically depend on your industry. It doesn't really matter if you're selling special cat food and need an e-commerce website for that.
It's a completely different story if you're developing a low latency trading system