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

[Tom Johnson]

I also would think it would depend on the project. I can imagine many where
one of the team members would have deep knowledge of the subject at hand
plus coding skills.

On Sat, Dec 8, 2018, 9:44 PM Marcus Daniels <marcus at snoutfarm.com wrote:

> 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> 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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