I found this part interesting:<p>"We found that combining project management and engineering into a role held by one person cuts down on a lot of communication overhead. It’s always the case that the person who understands exactly what we’re trying to build is someone who also understands all of the technical details of how exactly it’s built."<p>I find that in my office a lot of the project management is done by professional project managers. Rarely do they understand the tech/engeering piece, and it really makes it hard to communicate deadlines or timelines.<p>Having only worked in three total development offices I have limited experience here. How does most tech companies handle PM work? Is it done by experienced developers? Or simply the middle-management types?
<i>> We often do unscalable things for as long as possible and then figure out how to fix them later.</i><p>Funny... just yesterday we had pg's post about doing things that don't scale as long as you can <a href="http://paulgraham.com/ds.html" rel="nofollow">http://paulgraham.com/ds.html</a>
I'd be more interested in the content of the tasks. Development methodology is fairly meaningless unless you understand the scope of the problems people are solving.