yegor256 podcast

Building teams that were supposed to stay together for many years, was a good strategy, many years ago. Not anymore. The reality of the modern software development market demands us to work with remote programmers, who in most cases will be individual contractors or freelancers. They will not be emotionally attached to the team or to the company. They will be looking for the most interesting proje...

The current situation on the software development market it terrible: programmers are spoiled by large salaries and very high demand. They know that their managers can't really do anything with them, can't make them work faster or better, can't fire them, and can't enforce any discipline. Large companies, like Google or Facebook, have the luxury of buying 10 times more programmers than they really...

When a microtask arrives to you, very often you may need some additional information, which is not specified in the task description. Your first intent would be to go and find that information, even if it's not available. This would be a mistake. You should not spend your time, which is a valuable project resource, on something the management hasn't approved yet. You should create a new ticket/tas...

Most managers and business owners believe that programmers are interested in their ideas, in their business, in their vision. They expect programmers to work because they share a global vision. In reality, it doesn't work that way. Programmers work for their own profit and care about their own personal results. If the business fails to align its objects with personal objectives of its programmers,...

The business model of Zerocracy by definition requires a pretty big amount of venture capital in order to connect many programmers with many customers and make them attractive to each other. In order to attract VC money, we have to demonstrate them the traction on the market. Zold is going to help us achieve exactly that, by collecting micro-investments from you and showing bigger money people tha...

Microtasking is a great method of managing programmers, but it's very difficult or almost impossible to switch to this new model of work from traditional full-time management. There is a list of five simple steps I would recommend you making with your team if you want to get yourself ready for microtasking in a few months or a few years. First, make sure the use GitHub. Second, make them report th...

What do you do as a customer, when you realize the your architect is totally wrong and the architecture is flawed and you have to start from scratch? Most likely, you got aware of that from one of your friends of the experts you invited to the project. What's next? Replace the architect? Start from scratch? Or continue working with the existing team? My recommendation: never start from scratch. Th...

How much would it cost to create a Twitter clone? You won't believe how often I hear this or similar questions. There is no such thing as a realistic estimate of a software price if we are talking about a more or less big product. It starts with a few thousand dollars and ends with a few billion if the product becomes successful on the market. Those who tell you that to develop your app would cost...

A team of freelancers working in a microtasking mode is not focused on your business objectives, by definition. They are doing what they are willing to do, randomly covering the entire scope of the product's functionality. This is why so many customers get frustrated when they experience this for the first time. In order to avoid this frustration, you should do something, to align technical goals...

Very often customers of Zerocracy ask me whether we can find them some good UI/UX designers, who will make sure their application looks great and can work together with programmers. We can't do that because UI people are too artistic and their work has no explicit borders. It's better to find them somewhere else, make sure they are managed and disciplined somehow differently and let programmers in...

Why do startups fail? Conflicts between investors and founders, marketing issues, lack of customer development, not enough money, etc. I believe that all those issues are secondary. The primary cause of problems is the inability to manage programmers right and make sure they deliver what they promise to deliver. Everything else happens as a consequence of the technical incompetence of the software...

Very often our customers in Zerocracy expect software architects to be very knowledgeable in the tech stack they are going to use in their projects. Even though it doesn't hurt, but this is not what software architects are for. An architect is not going to be the knowledge provider in the project, instead, he or she has to know where to find the right experts, how to engage them, how to motivate t...

Many customers, who pay for software development, think that some programming languages are fast, while others are slow and when they need a great/fast/awesome application, they need to use the language some other team has been using before and managed to create some other great application. This is the wrong approach. Instead, when you choose the language pay attention to how it matches your busi...

I've heard it very often that people don't like the word "control" being applied to a group of programmers. They find it abusive, offensive, and de-motivating. I absolutely disagree with this. Control is abusive only if it's implicit, hidden, and not obvious. However, if the rules of work are well defined, accepted by everybody and applied strictly, just like those laws we all know in civil life,...

Agile, as a software development methodology, was invented by programmers and for programmers, to make things easier for them and to get a perfect excuse when things go south. In Agile the management is not in charge anymore, can't control things, can't really predict anything, and can't blame programmers for mistakes. If you are a programmer, Agile is your perfect shield against most of the probl...

In order to isolate your production from the "dirty" master branch, I'm suggesting to use a simple release/delivery model. First, you let everybody commit to the "master" branch, of course, after they pass all unit/integration tests and the entire merge pipeline. Then, you create a candidate branch, which you deploy to the staging environment and let your testers break it as much as they can. Then...

Most big websites I work with don't show their error details when something goes wrong. Here is an example: my account with Amazon is in trouble and I see nothing except the "We are sorry" message from them. Instead, I believe, would be much better to show me much more technical information and make me part of the development process. That's what we do in our projects: making our technical defects...

The biggest problem of modern software testing is that neither testers, nor programmers, or their managers understand the role of a software tester. A tester is not someone who confirms that the software works as intended. Instead, a tester is the one who confirms that the software has bugs and who knows how to discover them and document. I will be speaking in JPoint in a month, exactly with this...

There are many cryptocurrencies on the market, while 99.9% of them are based on the Blockchain architecture, with some modifications. About a year ago we decided to try to create our own solution, which would be a true alternative to Blockchain. It seems that we managed to achieve what we planned and now it's the right time for you to join us and convert your bitcoins to zolds. This is how you wil...

If I would need to create software for a nuclear power station, who I would work with: freelancers or full-time employees? Of course, the first intent is to get a team of full-timers who we can "trust" and who will care about the business, will be committed to it and will feel personal responsibility. However, this is a very wrong idea. The business will eventually suffer because of lost control....

Very often this question is asked: how Zerocracy can be compared with Upwork and similar platforms for freelancers. Long story short, we are not competitors and can't be compared directly. Upwork provides unmanaged teams of freelancers, while Zerocracy turn them into managed teams. You may and should find freelancers in Upwork and then come to Zerocracy and let your team work under the management...

When your objective is to put programmers together in one office and make them look like hard working slaves, spending the money of your investors, you definitely need full-timers, with good salaries and benefits. However, if you need to achieve results, and you know how to manage programmers, you need freelancers, who work for results, for money, and for themselves. You don't mix those two catego...

Changing jobs frequently is usually considered to be a sin for a professional programmer. Recruiters don't like that and to leave just a few places in the resume, to look more "loyal." However, this is not true for freelancers, who by definition change projects frequently. That's why their resumes have to look very different and recruiters and project managers have to be ready to read them differe...

Being a senior developer doesn't mean getting a large salary or being appreciated in the office. It means belonging to an elite group of developers who know how to do certain things and can do them. If you want to be senior, think again about open source contribution, about StackOverflow participation, about conferences and certifications. Without that, you are just yet another programmer, one of...

Most software teams interview programmers before getting them on board. Later they get surprised how was it possible to hire someone who doesn't understand programming. Those so-called "fake interviews" would not exist if we would let the market vouch for programmers, instead of us relying on the information we manage to collect at those Skype calls. We, in Zerocracy, pay attention to five things...