181–190 of 193 posts
Can we start appreciating and respecting other people's professional experiences without dismissing and criticising them? It's well written and brought to light a very interesting subject, e.g. "Marshall’s research showed that just 15-20% of riflemen in active combat positions ever fired their weapons".
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I will allow one more meeting to start a new sprint and end the previous one. Everyone should have prepared ahead of time to report on all their sprint items and whether they were completed, if not why not, and to present the work they will be doing in the next sprint. If the Scrum Master or whatever their title schedules any other repeating process meetings, fire them.
But what about that meeting that starts with "how do you feel today?" and "if you were a car, what car would you be? And why?".
Guy concludes the problem is “collaboration”, in general.
Yeah, no.
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Yeah, the sheer joy I've gotten from being part of a few collaborative teams in my career was amazing. It was like we all got smarter by working together.
Especially fun when you all have a good time being with each other and still have a super high performance bar. I’ve come to think those magic teams where the chemistry is just right are rare in a career. I’ve been a part of two out of my dozen or so teams.
That kind of full-bore magic has only happened for me once. But it was fun while it lasted!
This seems like a good time to point out something an early mentor shared with me: you can rate all jobs on 3 scales.
1. Do you enjoy the actual work? 2. Do you enjoy the people you're working with? 3. How's the pay?
If you get all 3 of those metrics over a "C", you're incredibly far ahead of most people. My golden-team job was a AAA job. My current job (where I get a taste of great teamwork, though since I'm leadership now it's different) is an B, and A, and a C+/B-. I've been here 18 years as a result.
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As far as software development goes, money is almost perfectly correlated with time.
That's never been true. At minimum, as it's missing the most important variable: quantity of people. 1 person working for a year vs. 12 people working for a month could cost the same and have dramatically different results. And it ignores so many other aspects of effective use of productive capital in software dev (toolchains, cloud, AI, etc.)
It's frustrating to pull more weight and take ownership when other people aren't. But what's legitimately soul-killing to an individual and deadly to an organization is the collective impulse to avoid giving those people credit when it's due. Most of those 20% out there pulling more than their weight just want some acknowledgement. Not giving them that is one way to quickly hollow out your company.
I've never cared about this, actually. For me, the camaderie of the team is most important, and next comes the money. Acknowledgement from people who barely know what I do: I couldn't care less.
If you’ve delivered a bunch and thats been seen then its much easier to advocate for higher pay and call them out when you don’t get it.
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To me, the _real_ thing that matters isn't quite date or budget, but something that somehow acts as an umbrella to both of them: the promise. When you promise to deliver something by a day, or within a budget, it's very clear whether you met your promise or didn't. However, when it comes to functionalities, there is more of a grey area: you can start to argue that something _mostly_ works, that some bugs are always i…
I feel like everyone in this reply chain is looking at this from a different angle of Fast, Good, Cheap. Pick two.
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Especially fun when you all have a good time being with each other and still have a super high performance bar. I’ve come to think those magic teams where the chemistry is just right are rare in a career. I’ve been a part of two out of my dozen or so teams.
I'm 56. That kind of full-bore magic has only happened for me once. But it was fun while it lasted! This seems like a good time to point out something an early mentor shared with me: you can rate all jobs on 3 scales. 1. Do you enjoy the actual work? 2. Do you enjoy the people you're working with? 3. How's the pay? If you get all 3 of those metrics over a "C", you're incredibly far ahead of most people. My golden-tea…
Strong words. I wonder if the author has PTSD from poorly managed teams and has never had the fortune to work in a high performance well managed collaborative environment. I agree these are rare compared to the other kind, but they exist. Groups of people can produce more than lone wolves. One person didn't build the pyramids, the Linux kernel, or Amazon Web services. Even when responsibility for a top level domain r…
But there’s a huge difference between communication and collaboration as infrastructure to support individual, high-agency ownership, and communication and collaboration as the primary activity of an organisation. Which, if we’re honest, is what most collaboration-first cultures have actually built.
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On Killing further develops the idea [0] by looking at a wider set of battles across time and, crucially, finds that by adapting training methods, the kill rate went up to beyond 90%. This then appears to come with higher rates PTSD. 0 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_Killing
On Killing also has serious issues with credibility it relies on SLA Marshall's dubious work, and several other examples it uses are difficult to take seriously. it's similar to Freud, where there are shreds of truth but not really universally true or applicable.
The psychological model it presents is concrete enough for anyone to present evidence against it. You can use the model to make predictions about human behaviour. The same cannot be said a out Freud.
Now, that doesn't mean its true. It merely means it's not complete rubbish.