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by maxerickson 4114 days ago
How many people have you managed?

How many projects have you conceived and carried through to shipping? How many of them are profitable?

I suppose Fermi estimates would be fine.

Those questions maybe have a snide undertone to them, that isn't my intent with asking them. You post confident rants about how businesses should operate, and I'm curious how much the above experience informs those rants.
2 comments
fsk 4113 days ago
That is a valid point. If you're so awesome, then why not start your own business and clobber all those people who do stupid stuff like Agile and Scrum?

I am slowly working towards this on my own, trying to get a personal side project to the point where I can do it full-time. I'm just starting and only spending a couple hours a week on it.

They used to be doing poorly-implemented Scrum where I work now, and I'm glad they dropped it. Having a daily 30 minute status report meeting that never started on time was killing almost an hour of productivity per day.

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sheepmullet 4112 days ago
"If you're so awesome, then why not start your own business and clobber all those people who do stupid stuff like Agile and Scrum?"

As if it was that simple. My company is 80% waterfall and yet none of our agile competitors can keep up. Is that because waterfall is better in my industry? No, it's because there is a lot more to success than picking the right development model.

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dasmoth 4113 days ago
"Number of people managed" seems like a wholly awful metric.

Can't we judge people by results?

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maxerickson 4113 days ago
I'm not judging anyone, I'm asking if a conclusion is informed by a specific type of information.

There's perhaps some phrasing problems with the question, but I think if you are talking about managers being a useless component in organizations it might be good to have >0 years cumulative experience managing people.

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michaelochurch 4113 days ago
Where did I say that managers were "a useless component in organizations"?
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maxerickson 4113 days ago
You're right, that's probably not a fair summary.

Maybe go ahead and write a more fair one (I think you can probably see well enough what I'm getting at) and address that?

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