[steveBK123]

> You should ALWAYS put your smartest/best developers on the least important project.

How do you retain your smartest/best devs when you are putting them on the least important projects and expecting them to tolerate infinite interruption?

Certainly there is a tradeoff of coaching vs doing for seniors, and you want to raise your overall team up.. but in practice a lot of "agile" environments are very focussed on output, and want to see more points/stories out of higher paid people. It sets up an adversarial system where nothing is expected of some, and everything is expected of others.

You are also correct about team size. In an engineering org with 1000s of people, you want everyone to grow and no 1 person really matters.

In startups, small orgs, and teams of 3-5 devs.. you do need your best doer to, actually, well.. do.

[bluGill]

The best/smartest get to work on interesting problems. They get interupted a lot, but between they have time to try interesting things that someone focused on the important wouldn't. They are the ones trying rust first. They are the ones asking "what if" and trying new architectures on a small scale.