Chrome was delivered without any sprints at all. The team came in at 9 and left at 5 (figuratively, people actually kept their own ~8h schedules) every workday for a couple years like clockwork. No drama. No broken marriages, no broken families.
It was one of the most formative experiences of my career.
I hear you asking, dear reader, how this miracle came to pass. How did chrome-team manage to deliver high quality software without death marches?
Funny you ask... Turns out that software projects actually benefit strongly from having senior technical leadership deeply involved.
By "senior" I mean, as a crude approximation, "old enough to have school aged children at home".
By "involved" I mean "typing code" and "reviewing code".
I know! In our industry it has been more common for such folks to age out to management and leave the typing to the kids.
I mean even at Google (on a different team) I was a "technical lead" in my 20s, and let me tell you, I had noooo business leading anything technical of any importance. But this is very common!
We would never accept this in other fields. Would you live in a house built entirely by junior carpenters in their late 20s who built one or two houses that barely stood up? Would you drive cars designed and built by junior engineers?
Software engineering is engineering. Like other kinds of engineering, it's a skill you develop over a lifetime, not a decade.
When I joined chrome-team I was in my early 30s. And I was on the junior side.
Most of the core team had already worked on one or two browsers before!
Having strong technical leadership has lots of advantages, but one of them is it naturally leads to a healthier cadence. These folks typically have to be home for dinner, and they're old enough to know that death marches don't work.
I think a decade or so back, it was harder to staff teams with strong technical leadership, because the industry was growing so fast and was so young. But that's changing now!
So if you're building a software project: don't cheat yourself, find experienced engineers to run it...
... and if you're on the younger side, also don't cheat yourself. Find you a team with experienced leaders to learn from.
Well this blew up. No SoundCloud but if you’re of the technically bent, I wrote a little bit more about Chrome’s dev process awhile back:
aboodman.medium.com/in-march-2011-…
Have a nice day!
Also: A few of us started a company building dev tools following the values we learned on Chrome.
Replicache makes it easy to add multiplayer, real-time, and offline-first to existing apps.
Learn more at replicache.dev.
We’re in beta and will launch when it’s ready :)
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