A Person is working only 50% in That Project/Area due other responsibilities (project management, partial time, shared time with another team or whatever)
It depends how granular the 50% is. I don't feel much cost from "context switching" overnight if Tuesday and Wednesday are project A time while Monday and Friday are project B time, but it gets to be a problem if I'm context switching hour by hour or taking random calls about A versus B during my normal working day.
As someone who regularly works on a lot of projects at once or regularly context switching, I think this is missing the larger point here. Returns are not magically nothing for someone 50/50 on two projects, but there is of course a cost, and that cost increases with the number of projects, the complexity of the projects, and the pressure for delivery of the projects. It also varies person to person.
Going back to your original post:
> Yes but doesn't work that way, with context switching cost and all of the rest people who are 50% in one projects are not really that effective.
Again, person dependent but missing the point. Would have it been more accurate to say they have 1.4327 engineers on the project? Probably. Is that helpful when everyone understands what 1.5 actually means? Not really. And two projects is not so unreasonable depending on the situation.
> If anything, shows that they were not that committed to even put a resource dedicated to that project
100% yes to that. And as we have learned since this comment thread, it was not a 50% time situation but actually someone wearing two hats (PM and engineer): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28426523
> Again, person dependent but missing the point. Would have it been more accurate to say they have 1.4327 engineers on the project?
You're reading too far, this is not the point of my comment?
As you mentioned on the part below I was highlighting that they didn't want to put dedicated resource on the projects. The rest is just your own imagination ramping up to assume that I meant something else.
And yes, we didn't know before that was one engineer doing also PM work. But so said, would've been more effective to have an engineer doing the work and a PM on two projects. Is easier to switch between managing stuff than engineering stuff.
> The rest is just your own imagination ramping up to assume that I meant something else.
I mean it was a direct claim in your comment I was responding to, literally quoted which is the claim that someone on two project is "not really that effective". I'm simply offering my experiences that don't always match that. That's not my imagination there.
No one here was arguing about that they clearly did not resource it in a meaningful way (I said as much in my post), that's not what this thread is discussing though...
