Wednesday, March 05, 2008

Just Do It Yourself

{

I go back and forth on the very thing Larry calls "Lead-Developer Compression Ratios." Two things happen over the long haul that affect my thinking: first, even though it's time consuming communicating needs to a junior developer, it seems to pay off when it comes to fine tuning and bug fixing - it's not something you have to worry about since it's delegated. "Finished" in my world means it's been through a few cycles of testing, cycles that take a lot of time.  The second thing though is when something is delegated and I think is done fairly well only to find at the aforementioned testing/bug fix cycle is horribly broken and either has to be hacked into a technical debt ridden working order or needs to be done again - from scratch.  It seems to come down to the complexity of the tasks - if it's simple you can take the time, if it's complex just do it yourself.

}

2 comments:

Unknown said...

Hee... I call myself a "database engineer" (since I'm not just a database administrator or a database programmer), but I always wonder if I'm being silly. Then again, I do have an engineering degree... "Get me 800 kg of Portland cement, this schema needs reinforcement!"

David Seruyange said...

hehe - it's so strange how job titles these days have the opposite effects of disambiguity.

Maybe I should borrow Hanselman's "Debugger in Chief" title...