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Why overpaying your developers is the cheapest thing to do

February 13, 2013 By 1 Comment
Mythical Man Month meets Dilbert

One of the crew posted up an article citing the Mythical Man Month today. This concept first came to me through an old co-founder who was a smart PhD type, he'd just read the book in the 1990s and I based all of my startup recruitment around this idea - it worked fab. Pay people who are brilliant "way too much" because it's the cheapest thing to do... I use a rough square law to extrapolate something more useful... simple project → 1 year, 1 coder complex project → 2 years, 1 coder → 1 year, 4 coders Or pu another way, if you can get a good engineer who is 2x as productive, … [Read more...]

Filed Under: Engineering, Programming, Working Life Tagged With: , , , , , , ,

Enspiral Engineering

November 30, 2011 By 3 Comments
Giant Sprinkler Concept

During a Kite Boarding holiday on the pacific atoll, Aitutaki (near Rarotonga), I read the book “The Ecology of Commerce” by Paul Hawkens. The sadness it evoked in me for how we have devastated the planet and it's ecosystems soon transformed into a deep passion to do something about it. I spent a few months searching the Internet, reading, networking and imagining how wonderful life here would be if we worked with nature instead of against it. I dreamed of ways in which we could create a restorative or circular economy and learned about concepts such as Cradle to Cradle Design and … [Read more...]

Filed Under: Engineering, Staff Stories, Work_Life