Every layer of review makes you 10x slower

That’s because most teams are doing engineering wrong.

The handover to a peer for review is a falsehood. PRs were designed for open source projects to gate keep public contributors.

Teams should be doing trunk-based development, group/mob programming and one piece flow.

Speed is only one measure and AI is pushing this further to an extreme with the volume of change and more code.

The quality aspect is missing here.

Speed without quality is a fallacy and it will haunt us.

Don’t focus on speed alone, and the need to always be busy and picking up the next item - focus on quality and throughput keeping work in progress to a minimum (1). Deliver meaningful reasoned changed as a team, together.

Every layer of review makes you 10x slower

We’ve all heard of those network effect laws: the value of a network goes up with the square of the number of members. Or the cost of communication goes up with the square of the number of members, or maybe it was n log n, or something like that, depending how you arrange the members. Anyway doubling a team doesn’t double its speed; there’s coordination overhead. Exactly how much overhead depends on how badly you botch the org design.

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