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Your mention of Joel's post made me curious to find and read it. I assume this is the post in question: https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2006/10/25/the-guerrilla-guid...

I'd say much has changed since he wrote that, and even for the time it contains some odd advice which he tries to force down the throat of the reader, but I'd be more interested to hear other's thoughts on the article.



To Joel Spolsky's defense, leet code questions where probably a great idea for him, when it was not an industry wide thing.

He also had this, what seems to me, nightmarish, dev. speed and progress estimation tracking app he made. I don't remember what blog post, but he described it and jokingly wrote that Lisa needed to get the speed up, or something. Fast forward to today and it is a predecessor to our agile nightmare. But I don't think that was his intent.


I remember when he made that post ("Evidence Based Scheduling"), and was also appalled. Yet, here we are today and programmer velocity is a now a measured metric in Agile.

https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2007/10/26/evidence-based-sch...


Oh ye thank you that is the one.

The general problem with Scrum like velocity tracking is that devs will start to lie to hit the estimates to keep the commissars of their backs. The best liar gets the straightest graph. And as devs learns to lie, you get the impression of improved estimation.

"Some developers (like Milton in this picture) may be causing problems because their ship dates are so uncertain: they need to work on learning to estimate better."

I mean ... why God. I don't know but maybe poor Milton has the hardest tasks, does not cut corners or what not. Brandon seems to "get it" and has silly narrow error range - I wonder how ...

(I am not bitter. Pinky swear)




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