Comment by iceburgcrm | Hacker News Reader

Comment by iceburgcrm | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

I find removing the organizing and communication layers greater increases your velocity. For each idea we need to communicate to others or ourselves (in a linear language) involves a translating process. Removing the need for that layer leaves you in the coding zone. Once you have to leave for translating it becomes an expensive process for your brain to recreate the verbal / non verbal environments (or takes too much energy to hold both plus the translation path).

I have a theory that burnout is more common when you keep shifting mental states. Developers who have a phone that keeps ringing throughout the day (or slack messages or urgent emails) are burned out at the end of the day more often than those allowed to be in one state.

I'm working in a library that was written by someone who no longer works at the company who thought this way.

It's an absolute nightmare to understand. He may have been in the "coding zone," but he chose variable names that make no sense, abstractions that don't map on to any actual entities, and left no coherent documentation.

I think the organization and communication layers are absolutely critical, and any apparent velocity tradeoff is just accumulating technical debt, because there's probably an entire team who is perpetually on the hook for supporting what you wrote, and actual long-term velocity over time depends on their ability to understand it.

I think communication layers are critical as well. On a team they are more important than the coding and that's why you hire someone to lead and organize everything.

Removing the large team removes those layers and it's why a two person team can do the work of 12.

Adding in documentation, training materials and providing support can happen at the end of the development cycle freeing you to support the project 100%.

It's not that you remove communication or documentation but do it at select intervals. Don't do a full scan of a table everytime you need a value found in the index.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com