People are Computers
24 Dec 2025 CommentsThere are a lot of analogies between people in a team setting, and computers. Calling out some of these analogies helps tremendously when it come to scaling a team.
- raw intelligence <> chip processor clock frequency (and turbo when drinking coffee)
- learning-based skill-up <> advanced instruction set / specialization
- unblocking each other <> embarrassingly parallel patterns / minimizing work in the critical region / indirection / atomicity
- work prioritization <> priority queue / nice values
- work validation and feedback loops <> compile-time type checking / schema validation / fail-fast design
- work planning around existing interfaces/checkpoints & migration <> compiler optimization upholding invariants / pipeline parallelism
WIP