Mob Programming – The Good, the Bad and the Great
Upvoting because it&#x27;s a fascinating idea.<p>I find it weird they didn&#x27;t really point out any down-sides, possibly because it&#x27;s a corporate blog and marketing wouldn&#x27;t let them.<p>Off the top of my head though, I&#x27;d be worried about:<p>- No time to think. I find I solve solutions by thinking about them, and I can imagine mob rule would lend itself to less thinking and more doing (fastest solution that sounds half-right gets done first). Similarly…<p>- Biggest personality wins. I&#x27;d worry that whoever had the largest personality would drive everything, leading to people being disengaged. Especially when it comes to engineering &#x2F; structural decisions, if that person thinks they know whats best you&#x27;re not going to have the chance to try something (and maybe fail) and grow as a developer<p>- No personal space. You know, maybe it&#x27;s because I work from home, but sometimes my fiancee messages me a video of a cat being cute, and I might just take 2 minutes off working to watch it, because I&#x27;m a human being and not a sack of watery meat sacrificed to the gestalt. I could imagine it would be very awkward to do anything at work that wasn&#x27;t explicitly working, which sounds pretty suffocating to me.<p>- Constantly bringing people up to speed. Maybe this is actually a good thing? IDK, but I think if some people are faster than others, or people wander off to make a coffee or whatever, or come in at different times, or leave at different times, you may spend a lot of time going over the same decisions and working through the same problem spaces over and over again. This could be a good thing, or it could be OK that some people know about component X and some know about component Y and there is little overlap.<p>If anyone from Meltwater is reading this I&#x27;d be interested to know if you had any problems (these ones or other), because it sounds like-- ignoring the first month-- this plan has no flaws. Which seems hard to believe.