
What if powerful languages and idioms only work for small teams? - theoneill
http://weblog.raganwald.com/2007/11/what-if-powerful-languages-and-idioms.html
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ed
I'm not disagreeing with the premise of the article, but I think the
efficiency of a team has a lot more to do with its incentive structure, both
social and financial, rather than its size.

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raganwald
Well, that's by far the most interesting response I've seen. may I quote you?

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ed
Absolutely :)

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DanielBMarkham
Great article that completely blows the conclusion.

Small teams are great for any-sized project with concrete, defined goals --
even if those goals are changing. Problem: any software project that's been
around in a large company longer than a year has multiple, conflicting goals.
No amount of software productivity is going to enable business clarity. So in
the natural course of business growth the business will generate software
groups that focus on creating repeatable software projects. That's because the
only rational response to the accusation of "you software people can't develop
code" is to show how you are able to create any kind of solution the business
guys want. It simply becomes a different set of goals. When you're small and
hungry, you have clarity of mind -- you can't afford otherwise. When you're
big and busy, software becomes part of a more political corporate culture.

I'd love to work on a small startup and make wonderful programs that change to
world too. That's why I'm here. But I'm not naive enough to think that there
aren't good reasons why large-scale software is in the state it is. It's not
something some kind of simple slogan can describe or fix.

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akkartik
That's a good point.

Perhaps you don't have to live with this, though. I've been carrying this
half-baked idea for a while: If small teams are so key it's worth trying to be
really creative to retain them, by trying various refactorings on team
organization.

You still have the problem of incenting high-quality workers, though. Which
brings us back to startups.

