We had the right corporate culture to make this attitude successful. By the time we were a couple of hundred people, though, and had hired some MBAs, that culture was mostly gone.
It requires a level of trust and a level of performance, that I now believe doesn’t scale. Note that we had only a single junior developer, an intern, who wrote our bug tracking system but didn’t otherwise interact with the code base. The rest of the team consisted entirely of experienced senior developers, including management. I think at up to about 25 employees, the shortest working experience on the team (apart from the intern) might have been 10 years of shipping code.
But I really respect Rich for taking this approach which is why I referred to him by name.
It requires a level of trust and a level of performance, that I now believe doesn’t scale. Note that we had only a single junior developer, an intern, who wrote our bug tracking system but didn’t otherwise interact with the code base. The rest of the team consisted entirely of experienced senior developers, including management. I think at up to about 25 employees, the shortest working experience on the team (apart from the intern) might have been 10 years of shipping code.
But I really respect Rich for taking this approach which is why I referred to him by name.