Is it possible that you've undervalued or overlooked stories in your backlog that will return thousands of dollars on every hour of your effort? Ar...
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I love your posts Blaine. Great as always.
Thanks for the positive feedback, Ben.
Very sound advice. As programmers, we tend to go with what we think is the most important thing, without any benchmark or measure. Need to be making educated decisions to make the decisions effective.
Yep, a friend once told me that "we have to develop things for people (our target people), and not for us at all ..." as developers we sometimes forget what our target market is or what they really want; That usually happens more when we work in a personal project.
Good point, Juan.
If you'll allow me to paraphrase from the book Code Simplicity (by Max Kanat-Alexander): "The purpose of software is to help people.
Yes. You're exactly right.
Our intuition is terrible for this stuff.
For example, my boss and I often have different perceptions about how well a marketing initiative is performing or how profitable something is. He sees things from his side and I see them from mine. But, in the cases where we have data to analyze, we often find out we were both wrong.
It's exciting and frustrating at the same time but I'm sure glad I took those stats courses in university.
I've never worked anywhere I could just throw up an experimental page on a production site to see what would happen, and I've never worked anywhere where suggesting to the people in charge, "hey, it might work better if we did X" was particularly effective.
As programmers, we tend to go with what we're told to work on. If you're in a role where you do that kind of analysis as well as development, then is it because it's a very small company where while you have some autonomy, you're too overworked to find time for side projects?
I guess I'm fortunate then to be at a smaller company, where developers do get a chance to voice suggestions and to try some things out.
This is a problem that the business tries to solve with DevOps or other cross-department techniques. Us devs, left to our own devices, will gravitate towards things that make sense to us, which isn't always the most effective use of our time, in terms of business value.