Stephen was a hired gun at my first startup. His contract started a year before I arrived, but he was long gone before I walked in the door. The story goes that when Stephen started, he found a small, solid team of five engineers, a QA lead, and a project manager. They were slowly and steadily going . . . nowhere. After two weeks of watching the team’s slug-like pace, Stephen was fed up.
Stephen, a guy we hired as a temporary contractor to tidy up our database layer, grabbed the greenest of engineers, moved into the ping-pong room, and told the engineer, “We ...
