I suppose if your primary goal is to write code and ship, you might like this advice.
Some of us like quality products. Maybe I am just old fashioned.
Collaboration sucks
111–120 of 262 posts
Re: Collaboration sucks
#112Earlier quoted context omitted.
At my previous job, "what about..." slowly became a trigger word for me EDIT: In the context of infinite pixel tweaking, layout tweaking, and of course, new features that would require significant full stack rework
The four worst words on a software project are: “Why can’t you just…”
Closely followed by
“This should be an easy lift”
Re: Collaboration sucks
#113If I don’t like my coworkers, I’m out. I like people who give a shit about the work I do (a.k.a “collaboration”). “Whatever, you own it” is just lazy for “I can’t be bothered to understand what you are working on”. The problem is not the collaboration, it’s the ineffective collaboration. Maybe the author should fix that instead of pitching magic anti-collaboration click-bait pills. Also, the problems you solve must b…
It's obviously written in a "hot take" fashion, to be deliberately provocative. Taking it literally would be foolish but there is certainly some degree of truth in there.
Any meeting with more than 3-4 people (and maybe even less) is probably a waste of time.
Creating a PR doesn't mean everyone just accepts whatever change you've made. But it certainly gives something unambiguous and tangible for people to form their objections around. Rather than objecting to some misinterpretation of the idea in their own head.
Re: Collaboration sucks
#114Earlier quoted context omitted.
Every delivered feature is a liability not an asset. If you don’t believe me, consider two products that make customers equally happy and one has half as many moving parts. Which one is more profitable to maintain? The one with less shit. Because the rest is just more liability. So if I deliver a feature all by myself quickly and move on to something else, I’m digging a bigger hole and faster than the wisdom arrives…
> Every delivered feature is a liability not an asset. > If you don’t believe me, consider two products that make customers equally happy and one has half as many moving parts. Which one is more profitable to maintain? The one with less shit. Because the rest is just more liability. You're mixing up the feature and the moving parts. A feature is an asset. Moving parts (or code) are the liability. They are not the sam…
> You're mixing up the feature and the moving parts.
No, you are, and this is why so many of us are shit at UX.
The ability to accomplish a task with software is an asset. Not every application takes the same number of interactions to finish a task, and each interaction is a feature.
Features in neither waterfall, scrum, nor Kanban directly correlate with the ability of the user to accomplish something meaningful. They are units of measure of the developer accomplishing something meaningful, but the meaning is assumed, not real.
Re: Collaboration sucks
#115Re: Collaboration sucks
#116Earlier quoted context omitted.
Every delivered feature is a liability not an asset. If you don’t believe me, consider two products that make customers equally happy and one has half as many moving parts. Which one is more profitable to maintain? The one with less shit. Because the rest is just more liability. So if I deliver a feature all by myself quickly and move on to something else, I’m digging a bigger hole and faster than the wisdom arrives…
> Every delivered feature is a liability not an asset. > If you don’t believe me, consider two products that make customers equally happy and one has half as many moving parts . Which one is more profitable to maintain? Wrong analogy, use the word feature in both emphasized terms. Consider two products and one has half as many features , which is more profitable to maintain? Well, it depends whether people are paying…
It’s a perfectly fine analogy if you can get over your own ego enough to realize your customers don’t want to hear about how very clever you are, they just want to get shit done and move on to four other tasks.
They don’t care about us. They don’t. They just want to do what their boss asked them to do or kill the bad guy to get the treasure, and we are often enough as much in the way as we are facilitating that.
Re: Collaboration sucks
#117> Every time you see collaboration happening, speak up and destroy it. Say “there are too many people involved. X, you are the driver, you decide.” (This is a great way to make friends btw). Corollary for managers: Do not say "it's your call", then once the decision has been made (and you skipped all the meetings pertaining to that decision), comment about how you would have done it differently and then retroactively…
At my previous job, "what about..." slowly became a trigger word for me EDIT: In the context of infinite pixel tweaking, layout tweaking, and of course, new features that would require significant full stack rework
I once worked at a place where one of the partners consistently claimed the engineering team over-built and over-thought everything (reality: almost everything was under-engineered and hanging on by a thread.)
His catch phrase was "all you gotta do is [insert dumb idea here.]"
It was anxiety inducing for a while, then it turned into a big joke amongst the engineering staff, where we would compete to come up with the most ridiculous "all you gotta do is ..." idea.
Re: Collaboration sucks
#118> Every time you see collaboration happening, speak up and destroy it. Say “there are too many people involved. X, you are the driver, you decide.” (This is a great way to make friends btw). Corollary for managers: Do not say "it's your call", then once the decision has been made (and you skipped all the meetings pertaining to that decision), comment about how you would have done it differently and then retroactively…
At my previous job, "what about..." slowly became a trigger word for me EDIT: In the context of infinite pixel tweaking, layout tweaking, and of course, new features that would require significant full stack rework
Similar to my experience doing low-level systems work, being prodded by a "manager" with a fifth of my experience. No, I'm not going to implement something you heard about from a candidate in an interview, an individual whom we passed on within the first 30 minutes. No, you reading out the AI overview of a google search to me for a problem that I've thought about for days ain't gonna work, nor will it get us closer to a solution. Get the fuck out of the way.
"Can't we just..."
Re: Collaboration sucks
#119Earlier quoted context omitted.
One of many reasons I left Apple. My manager's manager would say stuff like this all the time, and then when I actually made my PR he would basically have me redesign stuff from scratch. It made me dread working on projects because I knew that no matter what I did I would be forced to rewrite it from scratch anyway.
One of the many reasons I'm still at Apple. My manager honors my decisions (sometimes, let's be honest, with gritted teeth). ("People don't leave jobs, they leave managers")
one tactic is forming a group which bullies a manager out of their job. it's depressingly effective and rife within the professional public sector
Re: Collaboration sucks
#120I wrote a book about GitHub a while back. I interviewed a bunch of GitHub engineers. One comment was really fascinating: at least some teams required the engineer to write up an empty PR (with zero code) about how they were going to do things before writing any code. The team would need to sign off on that PR before any "work" was done. Can anyone describe that in any way other than collaboration? But, that's really…
I worked on a team that did something like that for important stuff. (We didn't bother for the relatively routine or uncontroversial changes.) Although in our case we did it in a team meeting rather than asynchronously.
It really was horrendously valuable. Many, many times someone would save a their teammate an ungodly amount of time by pointing out an easier way to do something. It was a big complex system so naturally none of us could be expected to know every nook and cranny.