More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
They had all done tours in companies where Scrum was implemented by technical executives, resulting in the weird dance of managers trying to manage teams into being self-managing. Or something.
in the corporate world, there was nothing like it. There was no objectivity. In college, if you’d gotten a C and marched into the dean’s office to announce that you were quitting, the dean would have laughed at you. In the corporate world, it resulted in them changing your grade to an A and asking you to stay.
For the first time in recorded history, we easily own our own significant means of production. Before the Industrial Revolution, craftsmen and traders did not own significant means of production—they had no way to scale. And starting with the Industrial Revolution, owning the means of production require massive amounts of preexisting capital. That has remained true up until quite recently. But now, that has vanished spectacularly. You can go out and get a computer for less than $200 and use it to start programming. If you’re willing to work and to bootstrap, that’s it. Your startup expense is
...more
Thus, our true vocation takes two basic forms. We allow people to do more stuff in the same amount of time, or we allow people to do the same stuff in less time. In both cases, we increase the value of efficiency in that equation.
Consider a law firm. Do the founding partners go out and hire a Lawyer Manager to order them around, and then do they hire a VP of Lawyering to order the manager around? Do they then hire a CEO to rule over everyone and a CFO to handle the finances and a COO to schedule court dates and such? Of course not.
The corporate world does not know what programming is. They view it as labor (more hours equals more output, cheaper hour rate means less cost), not knowledge work (problem solving takes time and some people are better at it than others).
I mainly think that the efficiencer firm will start to replace the staff of developers that you see at non-software companies: banks, manufacturing companies, retailers, and the like. At organizations like that, software development (and IT in general) is what’s called a cost center. That term describes a department within an organization that costs money to operate but does not directly contribute to revenue generation. Other cost centers include things like human resources and accounting.
