Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Collaboration sucks

newsletter.posthog.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

81–90 of 262 posts

Re: Collaboration sucks

#81

Post by binary132 »

ninetyninenine wrote: post #67
hinkley wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are worse outcomes than that. Software devs are clever people. Not all of us can be confrontational, and confrontation is not the only tool available to those who can. 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 dec…

Software devs also all think they're smart and they talk that way and take pride in it. The reality is many software devs are dumb af.

“trust nobody, not even yourself” applies here for sure.

Re: Collaboration sucks

#82

Post by milesvp »

I'm a little disappointed at the amount of me tooism in this thread. I think a lot of people here have maybe had really bad collaborative experiences. Maybe that's the default? most orgs are going to be bad at most things (tm).

I can't help but think about this paper I ran across over a decade ago, that found a very high correlation between team diversity and paper citations.

https://arxiv.org/abs/1803.02282

This one always stuck with me, partially because of personal biases, but also because it just seems so powerful to have access to different perspectives when trying to build something. I know from personal experience, that when someone on my team has something unusual about them, when we build a thing with them in mind, the final product is just better. It might be related to the old advice of making sure that everyone's computer is different to make it more likely to run into bugs. Or make sure the devs don't have the fastest computers so they notice performance issues. But I also see it a lot in gaming too. If you tell me a game has color blind settings, that immediately gives me a big hint as to the quality of the rest of the game.

So this begs the question to me. What is it about building with someone in mind that is different than the collaboration that the author is talking about? Like, we expect committees to produce spheres. And we expect bike shedding to derail meetings. But what is different? is it agency? is it a single vision for the design? There is definitely something to be said for having one person who really understands the problem being the one to arbitrate all decisions about the thing. Is it how criticism is offered, or maybe whether a criticism can be ignored without social backlash? Is collaboration really that different than customer feedback which is generally seen as healthy for a product?

Re: Collaboration sucks

#83

Post by IshKebab »

AceJohnny2 wrote: post #72

> 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 i…

You don't really need to explain bike shedding to HN.

Re: Collaboration sucks

#84

Post by slacker7081 »

kristianc wrote: post #13

“If you want to go fast, go alone; if you want to go far, go together” I've often noticed that this is a favourite phrase of those whose preferred motion is narrating other people's work rather than doing it themselves. Teams do go further together. But only when everyone is rowing.

In the original article the author says "ultimately leads us to ship less." as one of the drawbacks to collaboration. Says a lot really, if quantity of features shipped is a priority. Great way to build a feature factory, everyone shipping without feedback and having others question what you are doing.

Re: Collaboration sucks

#85

Post by anal_reactor »

chadrs wrote: post #57

Collaboration slows things down but going fast at all cost leads to tech fragmentation, tech debt, and product debt. fwiw I'm not in the camp of "we must have everything done in one consistent way" but there are places, for example a public API, where having 4 different names for the same concept, 3 different response format/url path styles, etc. starts to look really sloppy.

In my company we have the best of both worlds - things are slow as hell and there's shitload of tech debt. This is direct result of "collaboration" aka "nobody actually owns anything". I put forward a proposal to standardize various things across our software, and in response my manager called a meeting of 10 people. No proposal can survive a meeting of 10 people at once.

IMO the best way is to split your organization into units that nicely map with technological/business boundaries, and then give each unit the responsibility to own something tanglible. The problem is, if the organization is full of idiots, everyone tries to do the opposite, in order to diffuse the responsibility.

Re: Collaboration sucks

#86

Post by ergocoder »

brendanfalk wrote: post #24

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…

The thing is: once you have feedback, you have to act on it. Ignoring the feedback is dangerous unless sanctioned by higher leadership.

This is our nature, and the blog does hit this point where we default to collaborate.

There is of course a better way. A senior employee should be more intentional about feedback e.g. whether can be done later, put it on a backlog, or must address right now. A junior employee should be intentional about what specific feedback they need.

Re: Collaboration sucks

#87

Post by hinkley »

ninetyninenine wrote: post #67
hinkley wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are worse outcomes than that. Software devs are clever people. Not all of us can be confrontational, and confrontation is not the only tool available to those who can. 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 dec…

Software devs also all think they're smart and they talk that way and take pride in it. The reality is many software devs are dumb af.

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.

Re: Collaboration sucks

#88

Post by Ericson2314 »

I'm just going to say it's not a coincidence that this individualistic stuff is full of driving metaphors.

Driving is one way to get around; it's not the only means of transportation.

Re: Collaboration sucks

#90

Post by tikhonj »

> Imagine you are driving a car.

Rally races sometimes have two people, a navigator and a driver. The dynamic between them is absolutely fascinating. I recommend watching some videos because, before I saw it, I would not have imagined that driving a car like that would have been possible much less effective.

Post reply on HN