Noel Rappin Writes Here

Last year, when Obtiva was purchased by Groupon, I wrote a “what I learned” post talking about things I thought I came to understand about software projects after working on a bunch of them. Now that I’ve moved on from Groupon, I started to think about what, if anything, I learned while I was there. I keep coming back to three different things – this is a more personal set of lessons than the last batch, so maybe they’ll be less generally useful.

Something like 25 years ago, Bill James wrote an essay asserting that one difference between smart and dumb baseball organizations was that dumb organizations behaved as thought Major League talent was normally distributed on a standard bell curve, and smart organizations knew that talent is not (it’s the far end of a bell curve). Hold that thought. So I just finished reading Laurent Bossavit’s self published book The Leprechauns of Software Engeneering, which I recommend quite highly.