A great reminder that teams are systems too. An ideal system might look like:
An ideal system might look something like: having a group of developers who take perfectly-written tasks from a perfectly-formulated backlog, the task is instantly achievable, the person understands the task, writes the code without mistakes, and as soon as it’s written, they press a button and deploy, and the user gets the feature immediately.
In reality, this never happens because parts are taken away from the ideal system, sometimes intentionally but many times because of the constraints of real life. In real life, other humans or code assistants carry out code reviews, so speed of the system is traded off for maintainable code and knowledge sharing, super important attributes for a team.
Then, he asks the podcast co-hosts to play a game: we know that we can take away elements from that ideal system, and they will make that system less ideal, but in exchange, we will get something that we want. So, what might make a system produce 22x less output? One example is that you can add code review to the system. You lose something, speed, but you get numerous other elements in return, for example you get knowledge sharing, code that is more ergonomically correct, and a number of other, unseen positives.