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Collaboration sucks

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Re: Collaboration sucks

#151

Post by parpfish »

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…

i get preplanning big picture architecture or strategy, but i CANNOT plan out the actual code i write. i'm not sure if i just develop deficient mental models of the codebase, but my process for figuring out what to build is to just sit down and build it. my process is very iterative. lots of stubbing things out and working backwards (if i need this function to return an X, it needs args A and B which means it might be better as a method for this class over here...)

the only way i could come up with a precise plan for how the code needs to change is to just build the thing.

Re: Collaboration sucks

#152

Post by asa400 »

CBLT wrote: post #121
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'm there right now at my current job. It's always the same engineer, and they always get a pass because (for some reason) they don't have to do design reviews for anything they do, but they go concern-troll everyone else's designs. Last week, after 3 near-misses that would have brought down our service for hours if not days from a corner this engineer cut, I chaired a meeting to decide how we were going to improve t…

People think management sucks at hiring good talent (which is sometimes true, but I have worked with some truly incredible people), but one of the most consistent and costly mistakes I’ve observed over my career has been management's poor ability to identify and fire nuisance employees.

I don’t mean people who “aren't rockstars” or people for whom some things take too long, or people who get things wrong occasionally (we all do).

I mean people who, like you describe, systemically undermine the rest of the team’s work.

I’ve been on teams where a single person managed to derail an entire team’s delivery for the better part of a year, despite the rest of the team screaming at management that this person was taking huge shortcuts, trying to undermine other people’s designs in bad faith, bypassing agreed-upon practices and rules and then lying about it, pushing stuff to production without understanding it, etc.

Management continued to deflect and defer until the team lead and another senior engineer ragequit over management’s inaction and we missed multiple deadlines at which point they started to realize we weren’t just making this up for fun.

Re: Collaboration sucks

#153

Post by IcyWindows »

criemen wrote: post #62

> A discussion about building a specific feature can devolve into reevaluating the entire product roadmap if you let it. Well, if the product roadmap doesn't hold up to scrutiny, it _should_ be reevaluated. Too often people commit to something, and then continue building it, despite the market realities having shifted underneath them. I see most teams not asking themselves often enough "should we still be doing what…

Sometimes you can't get every staff engineer to agree to the plan, but you can't sit around forever unto someone caves.

Re: Collaboration sucks

#154

Post by bryzaguy »

keeganpoppen wrote: post #137
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.

it's funny because the facile sportsball analogy actually fails horribly here. "playing together more" is the absolute last thing that the undifferentiated mass of hundreds of people hitting the like button on a random nonsensical comment need to do more of. the only situation where collaboration of this sort is productive is when you cannot reasonably expect any other participants to have some sort of proprietary kn…

This is such a great response. It leaves me wishing I could delete my comment. A.I. told me there was a 2020 match between Lakers and Globetrotters which the Lakers won. Turns out it was a fictional match. I've had great success with mob programming so that's where my brain was at.

Re: Collaboration sucks

#155

Post by aweiher »

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?

Cross-Functional Teams

Re: Collaboration sucks

#156

Post by aweiher »

commandersaki wrote: post #29

I can see how the lack of collaboration lead to the posthog.com website design.

Yeah, right? They really have a great website. Even better, the sourcecode is on github with 200+ open PRs, 10.000+ closed PRs and 133 authors in this repo over the last months.

Re: Collaboration sucks

#157

Post by danielmarkbruce »

brendanfalk wrote: post #24

I think the real problem here is "decision making" as opposed to "collaboration" I can't think of a single time where having someone else review my work or give me feedback is a meaningfully bad thing. It's an opportunity to learn. But getting feedback is different to making the final decision. Instead, the real problem is the either 1) lack of knowing who makes the final decision or 2) requiring everyone must agree…

Collaborate has a reasonably well defined definition, approximately:

"To collaborate means to work jointly with one or more people toward a shared goal or project, especially by contributing ideas, skills, or effort"

What you are talking about isn't collaboration, it's feedback. You have the goal, it's your thing to do.

Re: Collaboration sucks

#158

Post by aweiher »

The author has a point here, collaboration without a driver will lead to a culture of talking instead of doing. To be a driver of a change you need agency. Great example with the PR. If I create a PR at another team, how will they react? "Get off my lawn" or "actually this is not something we had in mind but thanks for the PR, we are putting it behind a feature-flag and will try it out and measure the outcome".

Re: Collaboration sucks

#159

Post by Arubis »

tombert wrote: post #36
throwaway713 wrote: post #8

> 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…

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.

"Second-guessing works by forcing someone to reverse acts of destruction. If I delegate a decision to you, you quickly spin up a set of relevant mental models, work to get a lot of momentum into them, pay the cost of killing many possible worlds, and experience the relief of a lightened load to carry. Then, by second guessing, I suddenly demand that you resurrect dead models, so I can validate or override your decision. Next time, you won’t put so much momentum in to begin with." (Venkatesh Rao, Tempo: timing, tactics and strategy in narrative-driven decision-making)

Re: Collaboration sucks

#160

Post by marcosdumay »

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…

> You can blame Taylor for that.

No, you can't. Taylor was a huge advocate for standardizing people's work so it could be studied and improved. He was also an advocate for well-studied people to go and teach workers how to do their jobs, and a not intense advocate for thinking ill of workers based on everything you can expect from a rich 19 century guy.

What he advocate a lot against was doing power games against workers or automatically dismissing everything they say.

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