from Hacker News

Primed Team – High Performance Software Teams for Life

by primedteam on 2/5/16, 9:02 PM with 8 comments

  • by steven_pack on 2/5/16, 9:38 PM

    I like it. There was a thread on here recently about an ex-googler going freelance on toptal.com and earning $2,000 USD per hour. That still looks more individually focussed though.

    I know what you mean about the team thing though. After 15 years in IT in London, Sydney, Copenhagen and San Francisco, there are definitely some teams I'd like to work together with again to build something great.

    Busy with koalasafe.com just now, so not in for helping launch it.

  • by nedwin on 2/5/16, 9:27 PM

    Dig the idea and think there is commercial capacity for it. Potentially include product manager as well?

    Check out what 3wks.com.au do on a small scale but I wonder if for multi-year projects you might want a team with more practical experience in the problem area - which is where acquihires generally come into swing.

  • by bigyahu on 2/7/16, 11:15 PM

    Yeah, I love the feeling of being in one of those teams. It's a possible idea, but don't know how it would scale beyond one team. I tried to find projects on behalf of a number of great teams a few years ago, and found I'd always bias the #1 team in the set if they were available, because I felt like I had a better chance of a great outcome on the project.

    And these teams rarely invested any time in training up their own reserve bench, so often a team would be suddenly crippled by one team member needing to take time out to e.g. start a family. The team would start falling apart as other members were forced to leave the team to find gigs solo.

  • by lewi on 2/7/16, 8:27 AM

    I've been toying with this idea for a year or so.

    I've always found that the teams I've built are more valuable than the sum of their parts. With all of these great people I've worked with it's getting to the point some are moving beyond the horizon. I'm looking at a means to maintain a close and diverse group of these colleagues who can be called upon to work together on assignments and/or grab resources from the figurative pool to create new projects.

    Sounds good, but I feel the mechanics would be quite nuanced.

  • by fhub on 2/5/16, 9:43 PM

    One potential downside is around long term effects of hired guns on morale of the people who keep the lights on. Pay gap is stark in Silicon Valley and a concept like this might re-enforce that.

  • by patroqueeet on 2/8/16, 10:14 AM

    hey, challenge will be that these teams are breathing. sometimes they diminish for years and then at some point join again because time, business, trust and money make them working together again.

    the biggest challenge will be to make their outstanding advantages visible. As a dev team builder, I was always struggling to make my dev teams performance visible. especially to benchmark it against industry levels.

    means: probably if you can solve, making IT performance of individuals/teams transparent and industry wide comparable (and hence connected to reasonable prices to charge), you might have solved your intention already.