Comment by revvx | Hacker News Reader

Comment by revvx | Hacker News Reader

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> Supposing you literally “just write code,” there’s a ceiling to how much impact you can have

I'm don't see why a single person can't have a ton of impact merely as a coder.

I mean, this whole website is dedicated to (mostly) discussing tech startups and how (mostly) software disrupts and help scale outdated business models. Isn't the software-making business model also ripe for that disruption, at least in a smaller scale?

Couldn't a single coder (or a small team) help an organization get some competitive advantage when it comes to tools. Or even programming languages? Why does ALL the innovation has to come from outside in our industry?

Fred Brooks talks about "The Toolsmith" it the "Surgical Team" chapter in Mythical Man-Month, and how "the tool-builder will often construct specialized utilities, catalogued procedures, macro libraries".

Facebook made React, Apple made Swift, Google has dozens of those. And the teams doing those tools aren't that huge. Why don't we try new things instead of letting good coders go away or making them stop coding?

Yes and, if you're into it, you can model the effectiveness of those teams/projects in terms of productivity multipliers for other teams that use them.

> Couldn't a single coder (or a small team) help an organization get some competitive advantage when it comes to tools. Or even programming languages?

Sort of, but:

1) Knowing what to build requires deep knowledge of that the other engineers in your company are struggling with. Figuring this out requires a lot of time spent meeting with people and doing other things that would be considered more management than coding.

2) If the thing you build is good, it's going to start getting a ton of feature requests. Your company will decide that it's worth investing in, and suddenly you're either managing a team or somebody else is managing you and running "your" project.

Then get someone to help you run the team, instead of a boss.

> One person can only hold so large of a program (or so many small programs) in their head

Many programs can be small. But many of them cannot. For the larger programs, management is generally needed.

I agree, but this website was dedicated to startups once upon a time. Now the dogma is that a single coder can do nothing and you need a "force multiplier".

The multiplicand, which can be low or negative, does not matter to the vocal subset of talkers (often with vested interests) that has overrun HN.

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