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“Collaboration” is bullshit

joanwestenberg.com

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Re: “Collaboration” is bullshit

#71

Post by jrm4 »

Sure. I trust people follow this to its logical end, which is how bad our mental model of "work" is. The more I think about it, this may get to the heart of all of our (bad) economic theory. Which is that, in a simple survival sense, there is no requirement whatsoever that "everybody works," or even contributes, but to have a functioning society, we do whatever it is we're doing now.

Something like UBI with extra steps.

And perhaps the bigger issue to get over, there perhaps ought not be a moral component to this, in a world where technology + a small number of people can easily take care of ALL actual needs.

Re: “Collaboration” is bullshit

#72

Post by fn-mote »

When this article opened with a World War II story, I thought that the “collaboration” being discussed was people aiding the occupying forces. Sadly, it turned out to be less interesting than that.

Re: “Collaboration” is bullshit

#74

Post by sublinear »

smackeyacky wrote: post #42
sublinear wrote: post #15

> ...every unilateral decision gets read as a cultural violation and a signal that you aren’t a team player. Collaboration-as-ideology has made ownership and responsibility feel antisocial, which is a hell of a thing, given that ownership is the only mechanism that gets anything across the finish line. This is definitely how it can feel sometimes, but it's simply not true. The problem really is just poor communicatio…

Voicing your concerns will just get you a meeting with HR no matter how tactful you think you’re being

If they react that way, it's their loss. Expect better and you'll receive better. You'd be miserable sticking around anyway.

The only reason weak management is allowed to exist is because people never speak up. If you're the kind of person confident enough to speak up, you might be let go but will almost certainly find something better too.

If you're not that kind of person... well then fine go ahead and suffer. Is what it is.

Re: “Collaboration” is bullshit

#78

Post by the_real_cher »

t43562 wrote: post #67

Individual responsibility can just become a blame culture. I remember sitting near a team that worked like this - meetings with everyone trying to prove that some screw-up was actually due to someone else. In such scenarios nobody wants to stick their neck out at all, everyone hates everyone else. At a higher level the usual problem is with incentives being different from one team to another. If you want something do…

If ownership is clearly defined the person who screwed up should be clear.

Re: “Collaboration” is bullshit

#79

Post by quirkot »

timcobb wrote: post #69
diogenes_atx wrote: post #62

It's interesting that the author does not even consider the impact of incentives on performance. As Charlie Munger famously said, "Show me the incentives, and I'll show you the outcomes." It is true that collaboration becomes increasingly difficult as the team grows in size, but collaboration is not the fundamental problem. To manage a large team, the real challenge is to design incentives that properly reward those…

What kind of incentives are possible in your average tech work environment? A raise? A bonus? Raises usually come with more responsibility. I'm not familiar with tech companies doing bonuses.

Money is the sledgehammer of incentives. Above a reasonable amount of pay, it's overkill and makes lots of collateral problems. The really effective incentives are status based and situational to the group dynamic

Re: “Collaboration” is bullshit

#80

Post by hnthrow0287345 »

ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #3
igor47 wrote: post #2

Strong words. I wonder if the author has PTSD from poorly managed teams and has never had the fortune to work in a high performance well managed collaborative environment. I agree these are rare compared to the other kind, but they exist. Groups of people can produce more than lone wolves. One person didn't build the pyramids, the Linux kernel, or Amazon Web services. Even when responsibility for a top level domain r…

One of the features of my work, these days, is that I work alone. I worked in [pretty high-functioning] teams, for most of my career. Teams are how you do big stuff. I’m really good at what I do, but I’ve been forced to reduce my scope, working alone. I do much smaller projects, than our team used to do. But the killer in teams, is communication overhead, and much of that, is imposed by management, trying to get visi…

>trying to get visibility

They could review PRs and commits and specs to get visibility and reduce comms overhead, if they had the skills and time.

The non-technical manager also takes great conveniences in making technical people spend their time translating things. But no one ever asks the manager to learn new skills as much as they make developers do it.

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