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Engineering Teams Are Just Networks

bellmar.medium.com

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Re: Engineering Teams Are Just Networks

#21

Post by marcosdumay »

hyperman1 wrote: post #6
bjornsing wrote: post #3

These articles always skip over the all important context: What is the engineering team supposed to accomplish? > After a baseline level of competency is satisfied, who you hire does not matter. For your average CRUD web app this is obviously true. For the Manhattan Project it’s obviously false. Most engineering work falls somewhere in-between.

As far as I understand the author, it's always obviously true. She just ups the baseline to genius level if you're on the Manhattan project. Which makes the statement mostly tautological: Hire only people capable of doing the work. Maybe she doesn't want you to hire overqualified people, and wants you to shift focus on what qualities the team as a whole is missing. All of this never makes it out of hiring 101 teritor…

So, it's obvious that if there were some people much smarter than the ones working on the Manhattan project, they wouldn't be able to improve it on any reasonable way?

I could maybe agree that it's true, but I really don't agree that it is obvious, and don't agree that it generalizes to all less demanding projects done by less capable people. It probably is true for a lot of things, but claiming it applies to all seems ridiculous.

Re: Engineering Teams Are Just Networks

#23

Post by mcavoybn »

cee_el123 wrote: post #4

off topic - will the cliched human tendency of saying "X is just Y" ever end ?

Probably not, I think there is utility in relating two similar things, especially when someone is likely to be more familiar with one over the other. Someone who knows networks really well could find it useful to model an engineering team as a network. What really matters is whether modeling the engineering team as a network is useful in your case or not.

Re: Engineering Teams Are Just Networks

#24

Post by nonameiguess »

geofft wrote: post #19
bjornsing wrote: post #3

These articles always skip over the all important context: What is the engineering team supposed to accomplish? > After a baseline level of competency is satisfied, who you hire does not matter. For your average CRUD web app this is obviously true. For the Manhattan Project it’s obviously false. Most engineering work falls somewhere in-between.

Is that true of the Manhattan Project? The fundamental science that the bomb was potentially possible had already been worked out (which was why they launched it in the first place). Most of the work there was physically building the bomb, acquiring and working with the raw materials, performing tests, etc.; most of the complex work was still working from what scientists had already written. Consider that it took New…

Given how few countries have managed to launch a successful nuclear program, in spite of the basic theory of how fission and chain reactions work being published a century ago, there must be something beyond basic follow instructions ability required. Though whether that is anything intellectual versus access to raw material and enough time to enrich it and build facilities before the US or Israel notices and blows you up isn't clear.

Re: Engineering Teams Are Just Networks

#26

Post by psd1 »

jtth wrote: post #5

In an "X is just Y" comparison, a good heuristic to determine whether someone is being a human being is to ask whether the comparison reduces the humanity out of the concept. This kind of thing is sociopathic.

Ok I'll bite. Hiring managers need to make hiring decisions. What sets your spider-senses tingling in this article?
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