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Collaboration sucks

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Re: Collaboration sucks

#71

Post by thisrobot »

jesse__ wrote: post #15

While I don't agree with Charles' (clearly nuts) distaste for sparkling water, I'm happy to see people finally talking about this issue publicly. I've suffered through this at several companies, down to the level of sometimes spending like 3x the time it took to implement the actual feature on answering and 'fixing' pedantic stylistic nitpicks during code reviews. While having a homogenous style is important, I'm sol…

amen. i don't really care about style/format. my opinion is that if you care you should automate it.

Re: Collaboration sucks

#72

Post by AceJohnny2 »

> others feel obliged to give feedback because we have a culture of feedback.

See also "bikeshedding". Made famous by FreeBSD core developer Poul-Henning Kamp (phk). I see there is now a website dedicated to his email: https://www.bikeshed.org

In short: people give feedback and quibble because they can, to demonstrate that they're participating, that they can contribute.

Being aware of this habit and inhibiting it is something I teach to every new employee in my team. (If you know how to avoid it always, teach me)

Re: Collaboration sucks

#73

Post by joaohkfaria »

jesse__ wrote: post #15

While I don't agree with Charles' (clearly nuts) distaste for sparkling water, I'm happy to see people finally talking about this issue publicly. I've suffered through this at several companies, down to the level of sometimes spending like 3x the time it took to implement the actual feature on answering and 'fixing' pedantic stylistic nitpicks during code reviews. While having a homogenous style is important, I'm sol…

This has no relation with collaboration. Being nitpicky about a PR is wrong, you should have a linter or enforce the culture of not being nitpicky about code.

This is not a "culture of collaboration" by any means.

Re: Collaboration sucks

#74

Post by JKCalhoun »

AceJohnny2 wrote: post #49
tombert wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

One of the many reasons I'm still at Apple. My manager honors my decisions (sometimes, let's be honest, with gritted teeth). ("People don't leave jobs, they leave managers")

Yep. There are many, many teams at Apple. Your manager makes all the difference in the world. Hated working on the Photos team at Apple, loved all the other teams I worked on. (So I left the Photos team to go work on a team where the manager was cool. I was able to stay at Apple, just move about.)

Re: Collaboration sucks

#75

Post by bitexploder »

happymellon wrote: post #56
jesse__ wrote: post #15

While I don't agree with Charles' (clearly nuts) distaste for sparkling water, I'm happy to see people finally talking about this issue publicly. I've suffered through this at several companies, down to the level of sometimes spending like 3x the time it took to implement the actual feature on answering and 'fixing' pedantic stylistic nitpicks during code reviews. While having a homogenous style is important, I'm sol…

Have a formatter. There are plently out there that can be part of the compile/build/commit flow, to the point of failing pipelines if the files you changed not match the style. Let people know if you have a requirement on layout and enforce it. Code review is far too late.

Where I work the formatter is the final arbiter of formatting code. If you don't like it, good luck justifying a change and you had better have really thought about it and why your change is good, because thousands of engineers have tried and been defeated for one reason or another :)

Re: Collaboration sucks

#76

Post by hinkley »

throwaway7783 wrote: post #35

>>Prefer to give feedback after something has shipped (but before the next iteration) rather than reviewing it before it ships. Front-loading your feedback can turn it into a quasi-approval process. Don't confuse this with "Don't test and don't do code reviews"

The line you quote is oddly one of my strongest arguments against Scrum.

Agile in general and Scrum in particular don’t want to declare things as done when they aren’t and if you haven’t yet given feedback, is it really Done? I don’t think it is.

With Scrum the pressure to put away the done thing and start something else is very high. The moment you start thinking about your next story, unless it’s very closely related to the previous, your ability to accept feedback becomes quickly curtailed.

This is half of the point of Continuous Integration. Fast feedback is often the only feedback that causes behavioral changes. Things that happened a while ago become abstract. Think about a conversation you’ve seen where someone describes how another person hurt their feelings yesterday, versus five years ago. The reactions are very different.

So if you enjoy talking, I suppose it “works” for you but if you hate having to give the same correction over and over, you need to make the person stop and go back until they learn how not to get stopped. Anything else loses the war.

Re: Collaboration sucks

#78

Post by ergocoder »

commandersaki wrote: post #29

I can see how the lack of collaboration lead to the posthog.com website design.

This is an example of why collaboration and feedback before launch are mostly useless.

Posthog is obviously successful. The design is good enough. But is it perfect? nah. would a better design make it more successful? highly doubt it.

If we were to take this feedback seriously, then we would've halted the launch and redesign the site. Now imagine having 10+ feedback like this. This would significantly delay the launch which would impact the success in a significant way.

Re: Collaboration sucks

#79

Post by hinkley »

jesse__ wrote: post #15

While I don't agree with Charles' (clearly nuts) distaste for sparkling water, I'm happy to see people finally talking about this issue publicly. I've suffered through this at several companies, down to the level of sometimes spending like 3x the time it took to implement the actual feature on answering and 'fixing' pedantic stylistic nitpicks during code reviews. While having a homogenous style is important, I'm sol…

Every delivered feature is a liability not an asset.

If you don’t believe me, consider two products that make customers equally happy and one has half as many moving parts. Which one is more profitable to maintain? The one with less shit. Because the rest is just more liability.

So if I deliver a feature all by myself quickly and move on to something else, I’m digging a bigger hole and faster than the wisdom arrives to change directions.

But most importantly, none of the rest of you fuckers know what I built or why, except what you gleaned from standup or whatever docs I wrote in place of collaboration. And docs written without collaboration are usually hot garbage.

So what do you all do when I’m hiking in the woods and the cluster is on fire? Sure would be nice if I collaborated on that functionality wouldn’t it? Then you’d have two other people to ask.

Re: Collaboration sucks

#80

Post by IshKebab »

AceJohnny2 wrote: post #49
tombert wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

One of the many reasons I'm still at Apple. My manager honors my decisions (sometimes, let's be honest, with gritted teeth). ("People don't leave jobs, they leave managers")

I normally move within a company when I want to quit a manager. It's much easier than getting an entirely new job usually. And you have a lot more information about the potential role.

It's also a good way to get into areas you have no experience of.

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