Always Multiply Your Estimates by π (2013)

This reminds me of my game development job I had years back.

I was new to the field (but not new to software development) and there was this small software team doing programming tasks for the game. The lead developer was concerned on my performance after a few months I was there.

I remember him drawing an image excatcly like the second picture in this article (an arrow going from A to B). He said that my performance was very poor, and then he drew another picture that was like the circle in the article.

The way I worked was searching for a solution, going wrong direction a few times, asking designers for more information and then eventually landing on a solution (that worked, and users like it).

But I was told this is wrong way of doing software. I was not supposed to ask advice from the users (because the team "knew better").

He also told me that a good software developer takes a task, solves it (goes from A to B), and then takes another task.

After a few weeks I was fired from that job.

To this day I'm still baffled by this. The company was really succesfull and everyone knew how to make software. It seemed like a very harsh environment. Is it like this in the top software companies everywhere? Like the super-pro-developers really just take a task and solve it without issues?

I've noticed that there are some managers that want their underlings to be just "meat robots" that do as they told without question. Other managers value independent thinkers that can be given an abstract task and find a solution, even if that solution ends up being very different to what was originally envisaged.

The strange thing is that both approaches can be successful!

However, they are not compatible. At most, it's possible to have an out-of-the-box thinker above a team of robots, but that's about the maximum extent of mixing that works.

For example, in the robot-based team, managers generally don't explain any of the inputs and constraints that went into a decision to their underlings. This saves time, allowing them to manage more people to get more done. However, the creative types question everything, which irritates and frustrates them. In an all-creative team, managers will explain the backstory to the junior staff, giving them the information they require to seek alternative but compatible solutions. This takes longer, but then they can offload a lot of the decision making to the juniors.

Don't feel bad that you didn't fit in, it just means that you need to find a place with a corporate culture that suits you better.