Maybe it's in my head, but I have completed coding projects that I believe would have taken a team of five offshore maybe 12 weeks to do in the past in about ten working days while juggling calls and living normal corporate life.
The win is that I don't have to share the vision of what needs to be done and how it should all work, and then constantly monitor and reframe that in the face of the teams missteps and real findings. I work with the agents directly, and provided I set the architecture and build up systematically I can get really good results. The cycle time between me identifying an issue and the issue getting fixed by me and the agents is now minutes rather than hours or days with an off shore team. Even better the agents can provide bug fixing expertise much quicker than stack overflow - so I can figure out what's wrong much faster so as to specific what needs fixing.
It is no good walking in and requesting functionality, you need to know how the thing you want should work, and you need to know what good looks like, and what bad looks like, and how good is separated from bad. Then the normal process of discovery ("eep that doesn't actually work like I thought") can take place and you can refactor and repair as required.
Sometimes I start something that just doesn't work, you have to recognise that you and the agents are lost, and everything needs to be torn down. You then need to think properly about whats gone wrong and why, and then come back with a better idea. Again - just like with dev teams, but much more clearly and much faster.
The win is that I don't have to share the vision of what needs to be done and how it should all work, and then constantly monitor and reframe that in the face of the teams missteps and real findings. I work with the agents directly, and provided I set the architecture and build up systematically I can get really good results. The cycle time between me identifying an issue and the issue getting fixed by me and the agents is now minutes rather than hours or days with an off shore team. Even better the agents can provide bug fixing expertise much quicker than stack overflow - so I can figure out what's wrong much faster so as to specific what needs fixing.
It is no good walking in and requesting functionality, you need to know how the thing you want should work, and you need to know what good looks like, and what bad looks like, and how good is separated from bad. Then the normal process of discovery ("eep that doesn't actually work like I thought") can take place and you can refactor and repair as required.
Sometimes I start something that just doesn't work, you have to recognise that you and the agents are lost, and everything needs to be torn down. You then need to think properly about whats gone wrong and why, and then come back with a better idea. Again - just like with dev teams, but much more clearly and much faster.