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Ask HN: Has anyone ever done the Chief Programmer Team thing?

by janetacarr on 7/1/23, 9:00 PM with 1 comments

I've only ever seen this idea in academic literature about Software Development methodologies. If you experience with this methodology, I'd really like to hear about it. Positives and negatives.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chief_programmer_team

  • by codingdave on 7/1/23, 9:50 PM

    Formally? No, I had never even heard of it.

    Informally, yes, almost 100% of the time. All software teams tend to self-organize no matter wheat the formal org chart says, and this sounds a lot like where they end up landing.

    Because of that, though, I'm not sure I'd ever go for it "officially". Sounds like the kind of thing that will work great if a team lands on it through their own interactions, but will be overly dogmatic if formalized.