Collaboration sucks

Programming isn't a sport.

“If you want to go fast, go alone; if you want to go far, go together”

I've often noticed that this is a favourite phrase of those whose preferred motion is narrating other people's work rather than doing it themselves. Teams do go further together. But only when everyone is rowing.

While I don't agree with Charles' (clearly nuts) distaste for sparkling water, I'm happy to see people finally talking about this issue publicly.

I've suffered through this at several companies, down to the level of sometimes spending like 3x the time it took to implement the actual feature on answering and 'fixing' pedantic stylistic nitpicks during code reviews. While having a homogenous style is important, I'm solidly in the camp of "if you want to give me style nitpicks, just change them yourself, tell me, and save us both some time". This extends to like 80% of feedback I see in code reviews.

Be weird and do stuff. https://www.youtube.com/shorts/DjvVN4Vp_r0

There's no one size fits all - what they're saying would absolutely fail at the company I'm currently at, but sounds like it works for them. The key thing is to have a process that works well for the people who are there, and hire people who work well under those conditions. The people who do well at our company would not do well at their company, and vice versa. I don't like how this article makes a claim about what works well for them is actually a universal truth. It really depends on the people there.

We don't collaborate, we iterate. I'm the lead of my department, so I sst the initial direction of the new feature, discuss it with my team, assign it, and let someone build the basic functionality. Then I'll review it, and I will pick up the code and move things around, refine the UX, refine the code, and then maybe pass it back to the developer for more changes, until we arrive at something really good. It doesn't make anyone unhappy or slow us down, and we often don't know where we're going to end up when we start a new feature. Things are fluid, but we have a goal of making things easy to use. Iteration among the team members also ensures more of the team knows how the code works, and we often learn from each other. Maybe this is "collaboration" but we call it iteration.