The magic of software; or, what makes a good engineer also makes a good engineering organization

I think there is a similar fallacy for how we consider engineering organizations. Many of today’s “best practices” have been drawn from long-established internet companies like Google. However, the problem with copying their current practices on the basis of their success is that most of those companies found near-invincible business models that ba... See more

Engineering organizations today have ballooned to huge numbers of people, but these huge engineering organizations don’t exactly have a reputation for high velocity output. Some of this is the result of what happens with products at scale: it is just fundamentally faster and easier to iterate, improve, or change a product with 100 users than it is ... See more

For instance, sometimes we create abstraction layers that allow people to create things on top of them explicitly without having to understand anything beneath them. We call those “platforms.” The expectation is that when we create abstraction layers like that, we should see an explosion of creativity, since now people can focus only on the creativ... See more