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Collaboration sucks

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Re: Collaboration sucks

#241

Post by oumua_don17 »

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.

Any chance you were in one of that infamous orgs?

Re: Collaboration sucks

#242

Post by 6510 »

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…

If you know they are going to be like that you could try getting the information out of them as early as possible. Ask a bit to much about every detail, find the point where it annoys them then try not to cross it. When you inevitably do remind him of the previous rewrites and the time it consumed. It is our job to perfect this system. It gets considerably harder to request changes after you've asked not to be bothered with every detail.

That said, I will never work for a company unless I get to make all of the decisions, write all of the code and do all of the maintenance. The work one person can get done cowboy coding a pile of spaghetti is mind blowing. Cleaning up the mess later is so much easier and so satisfying if it was your own making. Until recently this was a bad formula as it makes for a terrible bus factor but now that we have LLMs it suddenly seems entirely reasonable.

Re: Collaboration sucks

#243

Post by tonyedgecombe »

ninetyninenine wrote: post #141
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…

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 sm…

Meanwhile the average IQ of computer science graduates is 130. Draw what conclusion you want from that.

Re: Collaboration sucks

#244

Post by marcosdumay »

hinkley wrote: post #210
marcosdumay wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 wor…

Standardizing people’s work turned them into automatons to be studied and improved by a management elite. Which all came crashing down when Deming had to go to Japan to get people to listen to his ideas and triggered a massive recession in the US. Deming and (to a lesser extent) Goldratt pull the employees back into the conversation. Tether are closest to the problem and even if they can’t solve it, they can help you…

The one thing people are complaining upthread is not Taylor's fault. He actively fought against it.

The stuff you are complaining on the first line is. But also, Taylor was an advocate for listening what the workers had to say too. You can't really blame Taylorism on him, he invented only the mildest parts of it.

And that said, Deming advocated standardizing work too. You just can't run a factory without doing that.

Re: Collaboration sucks

#245

Post by constantcrying »

What the article calls "collaboration" is not collaboration, but performative work, in other words wasting time.

People love to invent reasons why they can not do something. "I need help", "I don't know", "I don't want to decide this", then they use these reasons to do performative work, meetings, pair programming, etc.

Collaboration happens when multiple people want to achieve a goal together. What the article calls "collaboration" is multiple people not wanting to achieve a goal, while pretending to want the opposite. These shouldn't be conflated, as actual collaboration is enormously powerful.

Re: Collaboration sucks

#246

Post by ninetyninenine »

tonyedgecombe wrote: post #243
ninetyninenine wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 sm…

Meanwhile the average IQ of computer science graduates is 130. Draw what conclusion you want from that.

Did you deep dive into this? Given the amount of downvotes I have I’m sure you weren’t the only one if you did.

About 30 percent of developers have no degree. Which means… if the average graduate of CS is 130, how low does the average swe without it a degree have to be in order to bring it down to 110?

I mean I spelled out the math. Dear readers, Draw what conclusion you want from that while asking yourself: “Do I have a degree?”

I will say that iq varies heavily across schools as well.

Re: Collaboration sucks

#247

Post by duxup »

In email, instant messaging, and really most communication / collaboration I wish there was a setting:

"If you're not at least at a 7 out of 10 in terms of paying attention / understand the topic ... please refrain from participating."

I know it can't be done, but I think it would help if you COULD do that.

Re: Collaboration sucks

#248

Post by capyba »

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…

This works really well in mechanical engineering, too. We don’t necessarily use tickets specifically, but planning out work or a design upfront with a small audience saves a lot of time and wasted effort.

On some level this is just basic project planning, which in my view is an underdeveloped skill in most modern engineering teams. In the case of the ‘empty ticket’, it’s project planning but at a lower level. Not every bit of work needs this, but many would benefit, especially when the taskee is at a more junior level.

I wholeheartedly support this approach. Nearly every major project requires a team, not an individual, and coordinating and collaborating are basic functions of getting things done.

Re: Collaboration sucks

#249

Post by bunderbunder »

capyba wrote: post #248
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…

This works really well in mechanical engineering, too. We don’t necessarily use tickets specifically, but planning out work or a design upfront with a small audience saves a lot of time and wasted effort. On some level this is just basic project planning, which in my view is an underdeveloped skill in most modern engineering teams. In the case of the ‘empty ticket’, it’s project planning but at a lower level. Not eve…

"Without good [design] documentation every mistake, large or small, is analyzed by one man who probably made the mistake in the first place because he is the only man who understands the program area."

- Winston Royce, "Managing the development of large software systems"

That said I've also seen over-collaboration lead to a similar situation. In that case everybody ends up with their own personal model of what the plan is, based on their own interpretation of all the endless talking around in circles. Maybe there is also a design document that purports to be the source of truth, but nobody is actually paying attention to it. Possibly because all the bickering and confusion turns maintaining it into an impossible task.

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