Well, at the company I work at we have the only a few people write code model. Three people know the code inside and out and what every section does. One other guy knows the code inside and out but only works part-time and works on stuff that's sort of side-lined to the major stuff. Two other people work on new stuff that they put in themselves. Two other people work on tasks that the aforementioned three give them. Finally, four interns also do work on tasks that the aforementioned three give them. Not counting interns, we have nine full-time employees, and three part-time employees (four if you count Mark Egli, who I'm considering an intern above). Three of the four fulls and two of the three part-times do not code. Seven people code.
But the stuff we're coding is highly specialized - only one of our coding employees isn't a power engineer. The model we use for this is perfect for highly specialized software. If the stuff you're doing isn't highly specialized (as in, anybody with a CS degree could do it), then this model isn't for you. But if the stuff is specialized, then the guy might be right that there are too many hands in the kitchen.
Well, sure our stuff is specialized, but not every part of it. That was my point when I talked about not worry about low level software components. These parts can be used for multiple projects so it's silly to have every software project redo the code. We keep these things in special folders you can include in any project. The guy's point was that if someone else is responsible for a part like this, then when you want to change something (or it breaks) then you have to wait for them to fix it before you go on. My point is that is that if you did all the coding yourself it would take more time than it would to just wait for the other person to fix once in every great while.
We don't have things like this happen very often, I think this is the only time since we had this driver written for us. It really didn't slow us down since we have other things we can work on, and since I'm not terribly busy with other things I dug around in the code for a few hours and figured out how it works. So now he has no reason to complain, unless he wants to complain that he still doesn't know it and has to rely on me.
But the stuff we're coding is highly specialized - only one of our coding employees isn't a power engineer. The model we use for this is perfect for highly specialized software. If the stuff you're doing isn't highly specialized (as in, anybody with a CS degree could do it), then this model isn't for you. But if the stuff is specialized, then the guy might be right that there are too many hands in the kitchen.
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We don't have things like this happen very often, I think this is the only time since we had this driver written for us. It really didn't slow us down since we have other things we can work on, and since I'm not terribly busy with other things I dug around in the code for a few hours and figured out how it works. So now he has no reason to complain, unless he wants to complain that he still doesn't know it and has to rely on me.
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