Elided Branches - How Do Individual Contributors Get Stuck? - Summary 🔗

Click to see the full article. This is my summary, quoting and paraphrasing the content.

Individual Contributors often get sidetracked by …

• Brainstorming / architecture
• Researching possible solutions forever
• Refactoring
• Helping other people instead of doing their assigned tasks
• Jumping on fires even when not on-call
• Working on side projects instead of the main project
• Excessive testing
• Excessive automation

Individual Contributors often get stuck when they need to …

• Finish the last 20% of a project
• Start a project completely from scratch
• Do project planning
• Work with unfamiliar code / libraries / systems
• Work with other teams
• Talk to other people
• Ask for help
• Deal with surprises or unexpected setbacks
• Navigate bureaucracy
• Pull the trigger and launch
• Deal with vendors / external partners
• Say no