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Earlier quoted context omitted.
IMO this is very dependent on the risk of cutting once, so to speak. I'd imagine that at PostHog, the idea is there's little risk of cutting many times - iterating - and more damage is done by the measuring taking far too long.
This is true but there is another cost. If you carelessly write you can end up with a system which is a mountain of bandaid fixes; an incoherent and unmaintainable mess.
"you asked someone what they thought of your approach? BAD! that's not our culture!"
The problem is not the collaboration, it’s the ineffective collaboration. Maybe the author should fix that instead of pitching magic anti-collaboration click-bait pills.
Also, the problems you solve must be pretty straightforward and unambiguous (or you have a small codebase) if you have the luxury of being able to just make a pull request for it.
> 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 as a boss find yourself to be very busy all of a sudden, it is likely because you have pissed off and alienated your reports by questioning and overriding their judgment too many times. Suddenly the team needs your “help” to make every decision, and every bad outcome of those decisions suddenly becomes a surprise to them.
They’re letting you choke to death on your own arrogance and control issues.
I don't think this is good advice for building, programming, or operating spacecraft. Edit to add detail: a spacecraft tends to have lot of subsystems that need to work together well, each requires a specialist lead, and there's a high return on investment for things like improving efficiency, sharing resources between subsystems, etc. leading to reduced power, data, and mass requirements. They tend to be bespoke and…
I would argue the opposite. If your collaboration sucks IMHO you haven’t done enough. It’s a skill. Imagine you’re playing a team sport and you recommended people play together less to win more games. Now look up Globetrotters vs Lakers.
> 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.
("People don't leave jobs, they leave managers")
I think the real problem here is "decision making" as opposed to "collaboration" I can't think of a single time where having someone else review my work or give me feedback is a meaningfully bad thing. It's an opportunity to learn. But getting feedback is different to making the final decision. Instead, the real problem is the either 1) lack of knowing who makes the final decision or 2) requiring everyone must agree…
No collaboration means less opportunities for learning from people (even the post admits!) that are "better at what you are doing than you are", which imo stunts personal growth.
Decision makers need to be clearly appointed, accountable, and empowered to follow through. But that power then also comes with listening to feedback from all relevant parties. As long as they trust that they're being listened to, they don't get a say in the actual decision making process themselves. I also agree about taking reversible decisions faster.
Another point I deeply disagree with is
> collaboration forces the driver to slow down and explain stuff (background, context, their thinking).
Yeah, and that's a good thing. It forces them to properly think through their thoughts, if they can't explain what they want to do clearly and why, it probably shouldn't be done. Quality goes up by slowing down.