The Small Team

In my last post, I wrote about the choice between specialists and generalists on a team, using the metaphor of role-playing games to illustrate it. Now, I’m going to write a bit, over the next few posts, about my practical experience building and growing teams. This isn’t meant to be a guidebook on team development, or anything, but more of my approach and philosophy on team building.

D&D 1st Ed rulebook.
It’s all been downhill since then…

Sure, I also happen to have another awesome picture for this post that I feel reinforces my credentials in Role Playing Games, but that’s a total coincidence, I swear. Yes, I do just have these books lying around my office.

 

At many jobs I’ve had leading teams, I’ve started with somewhat small teams. For illustration purposes, the team I’ll describe will be an example, and not really any particular team I’ve actually had. Continue reading “The Small Team”

Risk, the Developer, and Patton

Every developer has been confronted with the request, ‘Take your best guess,’ in working their way through a problem. Now, this puts an engineer in a very hard position. Many teams are conflicted when it comes to taking chances: you can take any chance you want, as long as you only pick the right solution. That makes it very hard to put a developer in that position, since it’s not really a guess if the only allowed outcome is 100% success. Continue reading “Risk, the Developer, and Patton”

The Incident Pit

I’ve been reading Alastair Reynolds‘ work since I stumbled upon his short story ‘Galactic North’ in an anthology in 2000. His work is awesome and interesting, and one thing that has stuck with me as an engineer is the idea of an ‘Incident Pit’ fromĀ Pushing Ice.

When I went back and googled it, it turns out that this concept has a whole wikipedia page about it (albeit a short one). It’s worth checking out. TL;DR: it’s when a project or scenario’s incidence of errors begins to rise faster than they can be handled. It’s based in diving, where there are constant errors, and if an inflection point occurs, and error rates grow too fast, fatal mistakes can happen. Continue reading “The Incident Pit”