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Collaboration sucks
181–190 of 262 posts
Re: Collaboration sucks
#182Earlier quoted context omitted.
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")
I normally move within a company when I want to quit a manager. It's much easier than getting an entirely new job usually. And you have a lot more information about the potential role. It's also a good way to get into areas you have no experience of.
I tried that, multiple times actually. My options were already pretty limited because I didn't want to move to California, and without going into elaborate detail I the interviews for other teams just didn't work out.
Re: Collaboration sucks
#183This is satire right? I can't imagine anyone actually thinking this is a viable way to approach development. Anything but the most trivial software system is innately collaborative.
Re: Collaboration sucks
#184Earlier quoted context omitted.
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")
Yep. There are many, many teams at Apple. Your manager makes all the difference in the world. Hated working on the Photos team at Apple, loved all the other teams I worked on. (So I left the Photos team to go work on a team where the manager was cool. I was able to stay at Apple, just move about.)
I don't dispute that. I wish I had been on a better team. My team had a famously high turnover rate, so it wasn't just me. I liked my direct manager just fine, he's a decent dude, but I thought his manager, who I had to deal with a lot, was kind of a dumbass and I did not enjoy working with him at all.
I tried joining other teams but without going into elaborate detail it didn't pan out.
Re: Collaboration sucks
#185While 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 sol…
Who decides what is a nitpick and what is essential to keeping code clean enough that others can do their job?
Re: Collaboration sucks
#186> 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…
I'm not sure that's a corollary, it seems to have tension with "Prefer to give feedback after something has shipped (but before the next iteration) rather than reviewing it before it ships. Front-loading your feedback can turn it into a quasi-approval process."
Though I guess it is in tune with "no managers telling you what to do."
Re: Collaboration sucks
#187Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you don’t collaborate before it’s shipped and don’t retroactively review after it’s shipped, how do you provide input?
You iterate on what’s shipped. It’s not a one-and-done kind of deal.
Iterating on what has shipped inherently involves review of what has shipped.
Re: Collaboration sucks
#188I 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…
> Getting things done is an important metric.
The older and more jaded I get, the more I realize this is just not true. The most important metric is the meetings and visibility, for a larger org.
If you just get things done, the effort won't be perceived or understood. .
If you just have meeting about what you did, they'll be forgotten the next day, because it's some complicated detail that can't be bothered with.
If you have periodic meetings of what you plan to do, and allow people to comment/participate, they'll see themselves as contributing in a small way, which helps them remember, which helps them understand the effort.
Worst, if you plan well and prevent future problems, nobody can know your good decisions. So, the optimal route seems to be, have periodic meetings that high ups can participate in, to some extent, and let "unforeseen problems" happen, so you can be in meetings with higher ups, fix the problems, and be the hero. This isn't even really my jaded opinion. In the org I'm in now, it was such as widely understood phenomenon that a special reward package, and recognition, had to be put together for people who prevented problems from happening.
Re: Collaboration sucks
#189Nearly Everything the author suggests to do to root out collaboration is collaboration…
> So if collaboration is your enemy, how do you defeat it? Here’s what we say:
> Default to shipping. Pull requests > issues > Slack messages.
This seems orthogonal to collaboration…creating unnecessary issues or messaging people when you already have the solution isn’t collaboration. It’s just being annoying (or maybe an overbearing mandatory “process”).
> 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). How to make friends and crush collaboration
Huh? Collaboration doesn’t mean there is no leader or primary decision maker.
> Tag who you specifically want input from and what you want from them, not just throw things out there into the void.
Yeah, this is exactly collaboration.
> Prefer to give feedback after something has shipped (but before the next iteration) rather than reviewing it before it ships. Front-loading your feedback can turn it into a quasi-approval process.
Ok, sounds like they prefer feedback from collaborators after shipping rather than before. Sure. Maybe that’s better. Both are collaboration though.
> If you are a team lead, or leader of leads, who has been asked for feedback, consider being more you can just do stuff.
A team lead who helps out someone asking for help…sounds like COLLABORATION
> When it’s your thing, you are the “informed captain.” Listen to feedback, but know it’s ultimately up to you to decide what to do, not the people giving feedback.
Again, collaboration doesn’t exclude decision making. Collaboration is not majoritarianism.
Re: Collaboration sucks
#190Nearly Everything the author suggests to do to root out collaboration is collaboration… > So if collaboration is your enemy, how do you defeat it? Here’s what we say: > Default to shipping. Pull requests > issues > Slack messages. This seems orthogonal to collaboration…creating unnecessary issues or messaging people when you already have the solution isn’t collaboration. It’s just being annoying (or maybe an overbear…
IME “collaboration” as a term means specifically what the article describes and not the more general concept that you are using. So for example yes a team lead helping someone is technically collaboration but it’s not “collaboration” as the management bureaucracy would use the buzzword. How it’s used in practice is exactly as stated in the article: a way of folding in people into a project that probably shouldn’t be involved and don’t add much value