| Review: An anonymous "distinguished CEO and engineer" suggests if you can't complete a feature in a day, delete your progress (except for tests) and start again the next day. The author then recounts advice he gives to juniors, which is to stash the work and rewrite it, claiming that the next day the work will be rewritten in 25% of the time and 2x quality. This is unsubstantiated though. For juniors this suggests it will help them develop their capabilities to reason about implementations of problems without needing to face a a large amount of them. The author then gives another advice which is to ask for a solution to a problem then after the initial proposal, ask for a 24h solution. This is meant to generate "the real solution". He likens it the a path algorithm heuristic to reach your goal quicker. Overall the methods are not well discussed in terms of pros and cons, nor substantiated with experiments. Opinion: I think they may help some juniors who need to build up experience and may become stuck in development patterns. But they would rarely be useful to develop someone to be a senior, if all they do is chase fast implementations. In a way the post gives conflicting advice: write twice and write better, and think twice and think about the fastest way to achieve the goal, instead of engineering a problem. The author hasn't really convinced me of these approaches, and especially the last one smells of eXtreme Go Horse. |