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“Collaboration” is bullshit

joanwestenberg.com

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Re: “Collaboration” is bullshit

#31

Post by KronisLV »

> Every project now seems to carry more coordination overhead than execution time, and when it fails the postmortem just recommends more collaboration...

Or it gets stuck in code review cause one colleague likes nitpicking everything endlessly, so you’re stuck changing working code for multiple days.

Or they have questions and want to spend 2-4 hours in a meeting about design and how to do development “better”, bonus points for not writing anything down for future reference, them expecting you’ll keep a bunch of rules in mind. No ADRs, no getting started guides, no docs about how to do deliveries, probably not even a proper README.md, or versioned run profiles or basic instructions on how to get a local DB working (worst case, everyone uses the same shared instance).

Even more points for not even having retrospectives and never looking at stuff critically - why people keep creating layers upon layers of abstractions and don’t care about the ideas behind YAGNI/KISS. More so, no actual tooling to check things (e.g. code style, but also tools to check architectural stuff, and also obviously no codegen to deal with the overly abstracted bs).

It all depends on the project and team a lot. Some people have only had the fortune to work in locales and environments where stuff like that isn’t commonplace but rest assured, it can get BAD out there.

Working in a good team can be better than working alone, sure!

But working in a bad team is certainly worse than working alone.

Especially so when seniority is measured in years or nepotism and you’re told to not rock the boat and shut up cause “we’ve always done things this way”. I'm exaggerating a bit here, but I’m certain that plenty of people work in conditions not far removed from that.

Re: “Collaboration” is bullshit

#32

Post by bartvk »

noduerme wrote: post #11

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.

Re: “Collaboration” is bullshit

#33

Post by tarcon »

profsummergig wrote: post #24

Some may find this classic relevant: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Tyranny_of_Structurelessne...

Collaboration has structure. The structure is the result of "the activity to create and maintain a shared understanding of a problem in order to solve it" - which is a definition of collaboration. I don't think collaboration requires a hierarchy more than it requires a tool for groupwork.

Re: “Collaboration” is bullshit

#34

Post by moomoo11 »

You know you can just say no right?

And if the job is ass like that just get a new job.

Or start your own company.

This article is just a complaint slop, and complainers are just as bad if not worse. Do something.

Re: “Collaboration” is bullshit

#35

Post by RugnirViking »

rmunn wrote: post #18
mb7733 wrote: post #16

I was skeptical about the claim that 80% of soldiers refuse to fire their weapons, so I did a little reading and it seems like the original source has been pretty much debunked. This 2011 article sums it up: https://scholars.wlu.ca/cmh/vol20/iss4/4/ but it's been doubted for decades.

I doubt whether Marshall was referring to soldiers in logitiscal roles when he made his claim about only 20-25% of soldiers firing their weapons, but I do wonder whether other people are getting confused by those numbers. About twenty years ago I looked up what the "tooth-to-tail" ratio was for various branches of the U.S. armed forces, and found anywhere from a 1:10 ratio for the army (10 soldiers in support roles n…

I agree. It seems impossible that its referring to support staff in those numbers. I had heard of similar studies in the British Army in ww1, with similar results (training on man-shaped targets etc) - surely the army would be unlikely to change tack based on a study with such an obviously flawed conclusion.

Not to mention the fact that this was a time of much more serious discipline issues. People were executed for desertion, and despite that many people did. There was also much malingering, up to and including literally shooting oneself in the foot. Is it so hard to believe that some people just hid when battles came?

Id be very surprised to hear from the other person that by Vietnam they had gotten it up to 95% though. My impression was that the most effective move away from this sort of thing was the move to a professional volunteer army, no conscription.

Re: “Collaboration” is bullshit

#36

Post by gherkinnn »

mb7733 wrote: post #16

I was skeptical about the claim that 80% of soldiers refuse to fire their weapons, so I did a little reading and it seems like the original source has been pretty much debunked. This 2011 article sums it up: https://scholars.wlu.ca/cmh/vol20/iss4/4/ but it's been doubted for decades.

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

Re: “Collaboration” is bullshit

#37

Post by samrus »

ithkuil wrote: post #29
strogonoff wrote: post #23

This quote and the entire article could be extrapolated beyond the scope of an organization to highlight the importance of the notion of authorship in society as a whole: > The collaboration industry has spent a fortune obscuring a dirty truth: most complex, high-quality work is done by individuals or very small groups operating with clear authority and sharp accountability, then rationalized into the language of tea…

But at the same time we all build things on top of other things and rely on complex supply chains. That's also a form of collaboration

That seems more like independant collaboration. Someoje built something without getting 10 cook to taste the broth. If its good, then someone will identify it for its merits and then build on top of it

Re: “Collaboration” is bullshit

#38

Post by mememememememo »

tarcon wrote: post #33
profsummergig wrote: post #24

Some may find this classic relevant: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Tyranny_of_Structurelessne...

Collaboration has structure. The structure is the result of "the activity to create and maintain a shared understanding of a problem in order to solve it" - which is a definition of collaboration. I don't think collaboration requires a hierarchy more than it requires a tool for groupwork.

Above N people it probably does. Except rare cases where it is embarssingly parallel focused mission. Hacker groups, searching for a missing person etc.

Re: “Collaboration” is bullshit

#39

Post by mememememememo »

AndrewKemendo wrote: post #14

Prices law is relevant here: 50% of the work is done by the square root of the total number of people who participate in the work.

Probably of the value, not work per se? I have worked with 1 person of 1000s who I thought was literally doing nothing work related all day.

Re: “Collaboration” is bullshit

#40

Post by wiseowise »

A lot leaps from riflemen, who obviously didn’t want to die (did you expect them to rush Medal of Honor style?), to system features to model office work? Whole essay is incoherent mess written by one of those lonesome “no-bullshiter” who gets the job done but is so pulled down by modern day bureaucracy that even his clairvoyance can’t get through.

> Dostoevsky wrote _The Brothers Karamazov_ alone. The Apollo Guidance Computer came from a team at MIT small enough to have real ownership, hierarchical enough that Margaret Hamilton's name could go on the error-detection routines she personally designed

I have good news for you, my jaded friend! What is similar between those people and you? You’re an individual! Therefore you could write another masterpiece yourself, you can be next Notch, next copyparty guy, next Stardew Valley guy and a long list of creations created by an actuallly high-performing individual, not some complainer who is oh so encumbered by stupid social dancing.

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