[FRIAM] The Friendship That Made Google Huge | The New Yorker

[Marcus Daniels]

I think it would depend on the project.    Debugging something that is very complex that fails in an unpredictable way can be demoralizing.   If experiments are expensive, other well-matched people could keep the ideas coming and either speed-up or slow-down the work as needed.   More people could also mean that short term memory was effectively extended.   Poorly-matched people would be a disaster – just breaking-up flow.   I think it makes absolutely no sense to compare two veteran developers who know and trust each other, and are the best at what they do, to some random project where a manager is floundering about trying to improve productivity by applying a gimmick he read about in a magazine.
From: Friam <friam-bounces at redfish.com> on behalf of Russ Abbott <russ.abbott at gmail.com>
Reply-To: "Russ.Abbott at gmail.com" <russ.abbott at gmail.com>, The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <friam at redfish.com>
Date: Saturday, December 8, 2018 at 9:26 PM
To: FRIAM <friam at redfish.com>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] The Friendship That Made Google Huge | The New Yorker

What I found interesting was that they do so much of their work pair programming. I find it difficult to imagine writing software in that kind of relationship. I would guess that when I'm working on code, I spend no more than 25% of the time actually typing things on the keyboard. The rest of the time is thinking, or pacing, or getting tea, or looking things up, etc. I don't know how that would work as part of a pair. And yet they are among the best coders at Google. Jeff Dean is legendary for his work. And the other guy is supposed to be just as good. How can they do that while bound together? Hard for me to understand.

On Sat, Dec 8, 2018 at 7:33 PM Tom Johnson <tom at jtjohnson.com<mailto:tom at jtjohnson.com>> wrote:
Interesting read on the history of computing.

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/12/10/the-friendship-that-made-google-huge
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