melgor89 t1_iqrxupz wrote on October 2, 2022 at 5:39 PM

Reply to comment by bernhard-lehner in [D] Things to do for effective ML teamwork at an early stage startup by coinfelix

I would say that lack of documentation is one of the key issues in startups. Ex. Then nobody knows why sth was created on that way, what are the scores from the previous version, what was the main issue from last model. Everything is in sb mind, but when this research left the company, retreating the whole pipeline takes a lot of time.

So I would say proper documentation + simple code, without unnecessary abstraction is a key to move startup further.

People say that there is no time for making documentation as there are more important tasks. From my perspective, it is short term thinking as then you would spend 3x more time on figuring it out why sth was done in such way. This is just my thoughts, based on 5 years in startups and 4 in corporations.

rlagent32 t1_iqtw03a wrote on October 3, 2022 at 1:27 AM

I don't work in a startup but the culture at my place is very startup like. Lot of prototyping and fast iteration. In such a fast moving environment, code is constantly evolving so without the right documentation, it can get extremely hard to understand what the code is even trying to do. Of course there's a tradeoff between actually getting work done vs documenting what you're doing. But having the right level of documentation is a great investment since it allows people to actually focus on moving forward with development.