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“Collaboration” is bullshit

joanwestenberg.com

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Re: “Collaboration” is bullshit

#81

Post by recursive »

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.

Hours of PTO?

Re: “Collaboration” is bullshit

#82

Post by johnnyanmac »

>what are we actually producing and who is actually responsible for producing it?

I don't even think in this age it's a "collaboration" issue. We've seen years of mass layoffs at this point and there's little rhyme nor reason. Sometimes being the "producer" saves you, but not always. Hard work isn't rewarded and leverage isn't necessarily respected anymore.

Your best bet these days is "collaborating" with someone high up who can shield you. Not because you're a producer, but because they like you. The illusion of meritocracy has completely collapsed (at least in large companies).

Re: “Collaboration” is bullshit

#83

Post by plagiarist »

hnthrow0287345 wrote: post #80
ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The standups are also organized around disrupting a small group of people for the convenience of one.

Re: “Collaboration” is bullshit

#84

Post by bccdee »

bambax wrote: post #46

This article is so true. "Collaboration" is how nothing ever gets done; we have this expression: "designed by committee"; we should also have "made by collaboration". What's depressing is that it's like Fred Books' book never happened: most managers think the way to solve IT problems is just to trow more people / more money at it until it gets solved; and they're all surprised when it doesn't work, but try again the…

I think "design by committee" is a better target for criticism than collaboration in general.

If you get a bunch of people in a room and ask them for a design, one person is going to write the design while everyone else gets in the way. That's simply the nature of groups. The one person who writes it isn't even necessarily the best designer—they're just the one most willing to grab the whiteboard marker.

Conversely, if you ask one person to produce a preliminary design, they can leave, gather requirements, do research, produce a plan, and then convene everyone in a room to review it. Now all the abstract hypotheticals have been put to bed, the nebulous directionlessness has been replaced with a proposal, and the group can actually provide useful feedback and have a discussion that will inform the next draft of the design. And once the design is finished, everyone can easily work together to implement it as written. Collaboration is great, after someone has proposed a design.

That's part of what I like about the idea of Amazon's "culture of writing," though I've never worked in an environment like that in practice. Every idea needs to be preprocessed into an actionable memo before anyone tries to have a meeting about it.

Re: “Collaboration” is bullshit

#85

Post by austin-cheney »

Anyone who has worked in any large organisation knows exactly what I’m talking about.

My current employment is the first time I haven’t see this, the Pareto Principle.

The reason for this in biology is two fold:

1. Growth is distributed evenly as necessary to fill the containing system whether it is employment numbers or peas in a pod.

2. Resources are distributed to where they are demanded. Higher productivity individuals will consume a disproportionate number of tasks to complete as well as available resources. This difference is often statistically insignificant as a base difference but after compounding 20% of individuals account for 80% outputs and inputs.

Human behavior accounts for the same compounding because numerically growth distinction is similar enough.

Re: “Collaboration” is bullshit

#86

Post by kabdib »

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.

"The reward for winning is the opportunity to play again"

Re: “Collaboration” is bullshit

#87

Post by timcobb »

recursive wrote: post #81
timcobb wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Hours of PTO?

What if you have "unlimited" PTO

Re: “Collaboration” is bullshit

#88

Post by timcobb »

quirkot wrote: post #79
timcobb wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Can you give an example please. How do you do this without introducing bad vibes?

Re: “Collaboration” is bullshit

#90

Post by timcobb »

kabdib wrote: post #86
timcobb wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

"The reward for winning is the opportunity to play again"

That's what it seems like :)
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