So, you wanna know about my run-in with the whole “Steve Sierra” thing? Man, that takes me back. It wasn’t a person, not really, more like this set of ideas, this… philosophy, that got pushed on us a while back at an old gig.
It all started when management got it in their heads that we weren’t “synergizing” enough, or whatever buzzword was cool that month. They brought in these consultants, or maybe just read a book, and suddenly, “Steve Sierra” was the answer to all our prayers. It was supposed to revolutionize how we built software, make us ten times more efficient, you know the drill.
Our Grand Experiment with “Steve Sierra”
First, we all got herded into these workshops. Lots of fancy slides, graphs pointing upwards, promises of a new dawn. The core idea of “Steve Sierra,” as I remember it, was something called “Radical Task Isolation.” Sounds impressive, right? It meant every developer got a tiny, tiny piece of a feature, and you weren’t supposed to talk to anyone else working on adjacent pieces until “Integration Day.”
So, I’d get my little task. Say, “Implement the color change for the third button on the settings page.” That was it. I wasn’t allowed to ask the UI guy about the overall design, or the backend gal if the API endpoint for that button was even ready. Just code your button color, Steve Sierra style.
We also had these “Progress Pods.” Basically, you’d write down what you did every hour on a special “Sierra Sheet,” then someone would collect them. No daily stand-ups, oh no, that was too much “cross-contamination” of ideas. Just you, your tiny task, and your Sierra Sheet.
For about a week, it was kinda quiet. Too quiet. I got my button color done in like, twenty minutes. Then I spent the rest of the day trying to look busy, filling out my Sierra Sheet with elaborate descriptions of how I “contemplated the hexadecimal landscape.”
Then came Integration Day. What a glorious mess that was. Turns out, my button was supposed to be green, but the guy doing the button next to mine made his bright pink, thinking it was the new branding. The API I was supposed to call? The backend team built something completely different because they thought the requirements changed, but no one told them, or us.
It was like trying to build a car where one guy builds a wheel, another builds a door, a third builds an engine, but they never talk to each other and are all working from different blueprints. You don’t get a car; you get a pile of junk.
I remember this one project, a really important client dashboard. We were all “Steve Sierra-ing” away on our little bits. The deadline looms, we try to put it all together, and it was just… unusable. Features clashed, nothing lined up. The client was furious, and rightly so.
That dashboard disaster was pretty much the death knell for “Steve Sierra” at that company. Management quietly stopped mentioning the Sierra Sheets. We started actually talking to each other again, like normal human beings doing a job. It was amazing how quickly things got back on track once we ditched the “revolutionary” method.
So yeah, my practice with “Steve Sierra”? It was a masterclass in how not to run a development team. Taught me that all those fancy methodologies mean nothing if they forget that people need to communicate and collaborate. Sometimes, the simplest way, just talking and working together, is the best way. You can’t just isolate everyone and expect magic to happen. That’s just not how real work gets done, you know?
