I've been blessed to see many fundamental changes in my IT career when it comes to clients.
One of the learnings is the Tyranny of the status-quo.
Routinely proactively maintaining and updating systems fixes innumerable "quiet" bugs draining productivity across an enterprise.
The skill of surgeons varies tremendously, with bottom quartile surgeons having over 4x as many complications as the best surgeons in the same hospital. And surgeons are keenly aware of who is good & who is bad - their rankings of others are very accurate. https://t.co/1YOmLxgQEd
Software engineering teams usually take twice as long to get something done as estimated.
This is my observation, in general.
It’s also the observation 50 years ago, as written in The Mythical Man Month.
Incredible how this seems to have remained constant over decades:
Principle 3:
All your tasks are not created equal. Doing great work doesn't mean that you put in your best effort for every task
Understand the difference between Leverage tasks, Neutral tasks, and Overhead tasks, and aim for a different degree of quality for each type of task:
The CIA once released a guide on how to sabotage an organization, and I can’t shake the feeling that we’re voluntarily implementing these tactics today
I was just on a Zoom call that ended automagically after 40 minutes because the organizer was on a free tier. This is the single greatest advance to meeting productivity that I’ve ever seen. Would pay extra for this feature.
I've been using Jira for the last year and here it is added to my ranking of top project management tools:
1. Trello
2. Piece of paper
3. Word document shared via ftp
4. Shouting to each other over the table
5. Not tracking tasks at all
6. Jira
The value of experience is as much what it takes out of your head as what it puts in. That's why it's hard to use books or lectures as a substitute for it.
I wish someone had told me this when I was 20 and indignant that every job required "experience."
People are often surprised when a team accomplishes a lot despite being small.
Teams often accomplish a lot *because* they’re small. Fewer meetings, less miscommunication, tighter working relationships.
Fight the temptation to grow headcount faster than necessary!
If you estimate your coding project at X time, it should take you 3X to 5X time to do it.
If it actually takes you X time, then in about a month, you will find a bug that will require 2X to 10X time of additional effort.
Above probably applies to just about anything in life.