Pillar
Post-mortems, retrospectives, things I'd do differently
6 articles
Only 20 percent of executives say their organizations excel at decision making, and most report that much of the time they spend on it is used ineffectively. A large share of that waste comes from treating reversible decisions as if they were permanent. Amazon has a name for the...
Software maintenance accounts for 50 to 80 percent of a system's total lifecycle cost, according to decades of engineering research summarized in the peer-reviewed literature on maintenance economics. A large share of that money is spent touching things nobody currently understands....
In a study of 133 popular open-source projects, 46 percent had a bus factor of one, meaning a single person held enough of the knowledge that the project would stall if they walked away, and 65 percent had a bus factor of two or fewer (Avelino, Passos, Hora and Valente, 2016). The bus...
Average DevOps engineer tenure is 2.3 years. When they leave, months of institutional knowledge walk out the door. The build-vs-buy framework that accounts for departure.
DockYard paid $400K/year for an office with five people in it. Most scaling problems aren't headcount problems — they're tooling problems nobody prioritized.
The contractor-first assumption, the "culture fit" shorthand, and hiring before the process exists. Three beliefs that cost more than the headcount they were meant to optimize.
