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“Collaboration” is bullshit

joanwestenberg.com

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Re: “Collaboration” is bullshit

#91

Post by sosodev »

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…

Can we actually align incentives at scale? It seems to me that if it were possible we would live in a utopia.

Re: “Collaboration” is bullshit

#92

Post by lotyrin »

sosodev wrote: post #91
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…

Can we actually align incentives at scale? It seems to me that if it were possible we would live in a utopia.

The issue is that systems don't account for the diversity in how people are motivated and what parts of systems they are sensitive to and how they are sensitive to them.

By default in the dominant culture, most systems come down to individual incentives for individual drive and shame dynamics for collective drive, and that covers a decent chunk of how people are motivated, but leaves out people who are motivated differently and actively harms people for whom these are paralyzing.

Re: “Collaboration” is bullshit

#93

Post by TheOtherHobbes »

stanleykm wrote: post #5
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…

Agreed. I came in the comments to say something similar. I think the author raises some interesting points worth consideration but their perspective is so incredibly cynical. He mentioned a small team that made the Apollo computer program. Well it took an awful lot more than a computer program to get to the moon. I don’t think anybody would argue that there are people who don’t pull their weight out there but there i…

There's also a lot of evidence it doesn't work. It's not either/or.

This piece is more of a whine about a certain kind of office culture, which the author - unreasonably - generalises to collaboration as a whole.

There's likely a lot of money to be made by identifying and defining good vs bad collaborative cultures.

Both are real. But a lot of "good" practices are more cargo culty than genuinely productive, and the managers who really do make it work seem to get there more by talent and innate skill than learned effort.

Re: “Collaboration” is bullshit

#94

Post by ubermonkey »

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…

Yeah, the sheer joy I've gotten from being part of a few collaborative teams in my career was amazing. It was like we all got smarter by working together.

Re: “Collaboration” is bullshit

#95

Post by commandlinefan »

What I see - and have seen since I started doing this 30+ years ago - is that the date is _always_ more important than the actual deliverable. Always. Meeting "the date" is the only thing that's tracked (but it also never happens). It's even justified through vague analogies like Joel Spolsky's admonition that "you wouldn't buy a pair of jeans without knowing how much they cost" without ever doing a slightly deeper dive into how developing software is different than selling a pair of jeans.

All of the collaboration artifice that the author is referring to seems to me to always be a futile attempt to meet "the date". That software development might itself be _inherently_ unpredictable is never even considered, even though there are a lot of reasons to suggest that it is: by definition, the software you're developing has never been developed before, or else you could just use the thing that already exists.

I had a glimmer of hope in the late 90's when the agile manifesto was published - everything about it seemed to me to read "software development activities can't be coordinated like a wedding banquet can, but you can at least make sure that everything is tracking toward a shared understanding". I guess I shouldn't have been surprised when "Agile" became "tell me exactly what you're going to do and how long each step will take" almost the instant of its inception.

Re: “Collaboration” is bullshit

#96

Post by jimbokun »

plagiarist wrote: post #83
hnthrow0287345 wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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.

Standups should eliminate almost all other meetings engineers need to attend. Except to go deeper on questions that came up in standup that cannot be instantly resolved.

Otherwise yeah there’s really no point.

Re: “Collaboration” is bullshit

#97

Post by plagiarist »

jimbokun wrote: post #96
plagiarist wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Standups should eliminate almost all other meetings engineers need to attend. Except to go deeper on questions that came up in standup that cannot be instantly resolved. Otherwise yeah there’s really no point.

I would be pleased with the standup if it eliminated other meetings, but that has definitely not been my experience.

Re: “Collaboration” is bullshit

#98

Post by depr »

jimbokun wrote: post #96
plagiarist wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Standups should eliminate almost all other meetings engineers need to attend. Except to go deeper on questions that came up in standup that cannot be instantly resolved. Otherwise yeah there’s really no point.

Do you mean standups as part of Scrum? Scrum dictates several other meetings.

Re: “Collaboration” is bullshit

#99

Post by nuancebydefault »

It is true that on an individual level you get more work done if you collaborate less. But very often you will have solved the wrong problem. Collaboration often prevents that from happening because different point of views will make that clear before trying to solve a problem.
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