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Collaboration sucks

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Re: Collaboration sucks

#141

Post by ninetyninenine »

hinkley wrote: post #87
ninetyninenine wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Software devs also all think they're smart and they talk that way and take pride in it. The reality is many software devs are dumb af.

We are by and large hired for cleverness, so there’s a lot of selection that makes that true even if undergrads are not far off from average. It would be better if we were hired for wisdom. Don’t confuse cleverness and foolishness. You can be both. But devs aren’t usually the ones treating their reports like children and then acting surprised when their prophecies become self fulfilling. You can blame Taylor for that…

It’s not clever to brag about how smart you are or imply you and your entire cohort are smarter than other occupations. It’s a sign of how much you are the opposite of clever.

Additionally the average IQ of software developers is measured to be 110-113. That’s barely above one std of the average so you’re actually wrong. Software devs aren’t particularly clever but a disproportionate number likes to think they are smarter than normal.

So bragging about something that you’re completely wrong about… is that clever? No.

Re: Collaboration sucks

#142

Post by 0x457 »

marcusb wrote: post #117
kykat wrote: post #9

Earlier 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

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…

Have WE tried using caching?

Re: Collaboration sucks

#143

Post by ninetyninenine »

appreciatorBus wrote: post #131
hinkley wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We are by and large hired for cleverness, so there’s a lot of selection that makes that true even if undergrads are not far off from average. It would be better if we were hired for wisdom. Don’t confuse cleverness and foolishness. You can be both. But devs aren’t usually the ones treating their reports like children and then acting surprised when their prophecies become self fulfilling. You can blame Taylor for that…

Developers may be hired for cleverness, but cleverness in code and technical matters does not necessarily carry over into cleverness with respect to office politics or good management.

Cleverness in code actually correlates with cleverness in social aspects. People come up with this artificial dichotomy of the awkward nerd with high iq but zero social skill but the reality is both of the two correlate slightly.

At the very least we know there isn’t an inverse correlation meaning the stereotype isn’t really true.

Re: Collaboration sucks

#144

Post by InexSquirrel »

appreciatorBus wrote: post #131
hinkley wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We are by and large hired for cleverness, so there’s a lot of selection that makes that true even if undergrads are not far off from average. It would be better if we were hired for wisdom. Don’t confuse cleverness and foolishness. You can be both. But devs aren’t usually the ones treating their reports like children and then acting surprised when their prophecies become self fulfilling. You can blame Taylor for that…

Developers may be hired for cleverness, but cleverness in code and technical matters does not necessarily carry over into cleverness with respect to office politics or good management.

Hired for ultimately a fairly narrow field of expertise. But do need support in the sense of building the right thing, ensuring that thing aligns with business objectives, that constraints and requirements and customer needs have been communicated.

So in that light - either you give engineers the support they need (which can be quite a lot, more than I think most care to admit), or accept they're going to get a lot of stuff wrong. Probably technically correct and good, but still wrong.

Re: Collaboration sucks

#145

Post by lmm »

lionkor wrote: post #124
xrd wrote: post #103

I 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…

> 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? That sounds like an ad-hoc planning for a single issue, which you could also just do for a subset of the open issues, every, lets say, 2 weeks. And so we invented SCRUM.

> That sounds like an ad-hoc planning for a single issue, which you could also just do for a subset of the open issues, every, lets say, 2 weeks.

So you'd require the whole team to spend time on matters that interested only a subset, and you'd do this in a blocking way rather than asynchronously? What possible benefit would that have?

Re: Collaboration sucks

#146

Post by [deleted] »

singron wrote: post #48
bryzaguy wrote: post #4

I would argue the opposite. If your collaboration sucks IMHO you haven’t done enough. It’s a skill. Imagine you’re playing a team sport and you recommended people play together less to win more games. Now look up Globetrotters vs Lakers.

I think the sports analogy would be passing the ball back and forth in front of the goal instead of shooting. Nearly every time, an athlete with the ball in front of an open goal will take the shot themselves instead of passing. Even in a 2v1 situation, passing is a huge risk and taking the shot has a high likelihood of scoring, so you only want to pass if the defender is leaving your teammate open (usually they spli…

[deleted]

Re: Collaboration sucks

#147

Post by james_marks »

romanhn wrote: post #108

The author talks about having a clear bias for action (a great thing!) but in the process throws the baby out with the bathwater. Without collaboration you'll end up with silos, overconfident decision-makers, and all sorts of preventable production issues, all in the name of avoiding the dirty C word. How about following the approach of pragmatism and finding a solid middle ground that achieves the best results longt…

The power of this is in the work you’ve done to frame it as yes/no, with a default to going ahead.

This is how things get done.

Re: Collaboration sucks

#148

Post by mupuff1234 »

xrd wrote: post #103

I 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…

So a design doc?

Re: Collaboration sucks

#149

Post by [deleted] »

jiggawatts wrote: post #21
upghost wrote: post #18

Taking the article's analogy of the "collaboration while driving", the F1 sport is quite insanely collaborative. For example, the drivers literally do have someone in their ear by radio being their coach and spotter for the entire trip. I've never heard of the equivalent in software. Does anyone know of anything like this?

Pair programming.

[deleted]

Re: Collaboration sucks

#150

Post by Trasmatta »

Even if collaboration doesn't suck, it's what drains me the most about software development. Give me the power and trust to make decisions, and let me go into a room and build stuff. If you don't trust me to do that, then fire me.
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