2001/02/12

When you’re managing a team of programmers, one of the first things you have to learn to get right is task allocation. That’s just a five-dollar word for giving people things to do. It’s known colloquially as “file dumping” in Hebrew (because you dump files in peoples’ laps). And how you decide which files to dump in which laps is one of the areas where you can get incredible productivity benefits if you do it right. Do it wrong, and you can create one of those gnarly situations where nobody gets anything accomplished and everybody complains that “nothing ever gets done around here.”

My latest article, Human Task Switches Considered Harmful, explains why you should be careful that each programmer is only working on one thing at a time.

Don’t buy puppies at pet stores.

New Yorkers for Companion Animals

Petfinder

About the author.

In 2000 I co-founded Fog Creek Software, where we created lots of cool things like the FogBugz bug tracker, Trello, and Glitch. I also worked with Jeff Atwood to create Stack Overflow and served as CEO of Stack Overflow from 2010-2019. Today I serve as the chairman of the board for Stack Overflow, Glitch, and HASH.