10 ms·

One of the biggest Aha!! moments I had happened when I created my first company and realized how important joining people of different personalities together is

• gm-conspiracy 10y ago
  It is a terrible thing that our educational system favors so much individualism, even when most important work(Nobel prices, great products or services) are done in teams. I bet the one-room school house fostered the prosperity you mentioned. Cooperative learning is what I think you are describing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cooperative_learning https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cooperative_learning
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• aaron-lebo 10y ago
  It is a terrible thing that our educational system favors so much individualism, even when most important work(Nobel prices, great products or services) are done in teams. Just to be clear this sounds intuitive but there's no underlying truth to how good work is done. John Nash and Tesla were crazy and were also at times very solitary thinkers. On the other hand, Edison was hailed as a creative genius but much of his work was done in a team laboratory setting. I am incredibly glad that the US fosters the individualism it does. You're probably able to make that comment on this message board because of it. That's not to say it doesn't have (major) flaws with people thinking they are the next coming of Alexander because they built a web app and forgetting the role that groups play in building individuals. However, I would absolutely hate to try and force creativity through a force socialization - we need more ways of thinking and doing and not less. I think even your wording says a lot: moments I had happened when I created my first company and realized how important joining people of different personalities together is in order to make them prosper. When someone starts too many projects but finish none, for me is a symptom that he simply can't finish it alone. In my company I have gotten practice on making people finish things. You are one type of thinker - but even here you are tempted to push that way of working onto others because it's the way to get things done (valid!). On the other hand, some people's productivity will plummet when they are forced to work and hate even the sentiment of joining people of different personalities together is in order to make them prosper - you could see someone hearing that from above resenting it.
  • ci5er 10y ago
    Joiners seem to intuitively believe that fostering joining by compelling joining is an unalloyed universal good. (Yes, I'm looking at you paired-programming advocates!) It takes some observational skill -- and empathy! -- on their part to come to the conclusion that not all meatbots are built alike in this regard.
    • tonyedgecombe 10y ago
      It's not unlike the way many extroverts think about introverts.
  • magicalist 10y ago
    There are different ways of joining people together than forced paired programming. Loose coupling of people can be effective too.
• douche 10y ago
  > It is a terrible thing that our educational system favors so much individualism, even when most important work(Nobel prices, great products or services) are done in teams. Does our educational system favor individualism? My entire educational career was spent battling against enforced collaboration and group work, aka, get the smart kid to teach the rest of the dubs and do their work for them. Fostering love of solo work and resentment of collaboration might be a side-effect of such practices, but somehow I don't think that's the intention.
• z3t4 10y ago
  its better to own a part of something then 100% of nothing
  • WJW 10y ago
    Unless that something is of negative value.
• fpoling 10y ago
  It may seem that US educational system favour individualism, but there are no indications that it has any significant consequences. Google failed to find correlations between performance at college and performance at work [1]. Also there are schools where children are free to do anything during school time including entering/leaving any lecture or activity at will at any moment. Yet there are no indications that on average it makes those that attend such schools any worse in a later life [2] [1] http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/20/business/in-head-hunting-big-data-may-not-be-such-a-big-deal.html?partner=socialflow&smid=tw-nytimesbusiness http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/20/business/in-head-hunting-b... [2] https://www.amazon.com/Free-Learn-Unleashing-Instinct-Self-Reliant/dp/0465025994 https://www.amazon.com/Free-Learn-Unleashing-Instinct-Self-R...
  • 65827 10y ago
    Fortunately there are more metrics to judge the value of an education and a life than "how productive were they at fucking google".
    • sdenton4 10y ago
      It's not that academics are not a useful precursor to work, but that the academy and the company are evaluating people on apparently orthogonal metrics. Which in itself is a really interesting result.
    • BrandonMarc 10y ago
      No kidding. I once read an article where a lady at Google was giving resume advice for how to stand out and get hired by an awesome company, like Google. She gives her own resume as an example, and after one glance I'm frankly pissed off. Why? Her resume shows she graduated college at age 12. Well Hells bells, señorita, if I was a genius like that getting hired at Google would be (more of a) cinch for me, too.
  • magicalist 10y ago
    >> It is a terrible thing that our educational system favors so much individualism, even when most important work(Nobel prices, great products or services) are done in teams. > It may seem that US educational system favour individualism, but there are no indications that it has any significant consequences. Google failed to find correlations between performance at college and performance at work These aren't incompatible ideas. You can drill into kids the idea of the lone genius fixing the world (Newton, Thomas Edison, Albert Einstein, political figures like Thomas Jefferson and FDR) ignoring the history and vast apparatus that supported them, and you can fail to teach them how to effectively work in teams. As long as you don't grade these things directly (which would be extremely difficult anyways), you wouldn't expect a correlation between a student's opinion on individualism and their grade.
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• virtuabhi 10y ago
  I don't think there is anything wrong with favoring individualism (lets say 70% individual work, 30% group work) in education. You can get great work done in teams only if each indiviual is good enough to work independently. That is one of the reasons why startups are able to get so much done with their first (small) batch of (talented) engineers.
• drdeadringer 10y ago
  Self awareness helps with this. I can test that widget for you, but don't ask me to design it.
• mhurron 10y ago
  > It is a terrible thing that our educational system favors so much individualism I have no idea where you got that idea from. Everything is set up for everyone to do exactly the same thing in exactly the same way with group projects where everyone passes or everyone fails with no regard to the individual effort put into it.
• wfo 10y ago
  A huge (the primary?) purpose of the educational system is not to teach people how to do things, but rather to rate and rank them for comparison. As an instructor there's always a conflict, you want to provide an accurate ranking of ability/knowledge/etc in the subject in the form of grades but you also want to push the students to learn and do interesting work, unfortunately it's impossible to do the first with groups, and often it's impossible to do the second without them.
• kirse 10y ago
  for me is a symptom that he simply can't finish it alone It's tough to be a finisher, in just about anything. The Bible calls the concept of finishing "perseverance". So whether it is running a race, a personal project, spiritual patience... it's just tough to finish anything. You get to that point where you've got most of the validation you wanted from doing something, but there's still energy to be invested or an obstacle to overcome. I think the art of finishing lies in realizing that what is of true value is the doing of the work... Not so much the outcome or end goal that you desire from the work, but the faithful daily investment of energy towards that goal... That's what really matters, because if we're honest, we don't really control whether or not we finish something.
  • solatic 10y ago
    Upvoted because you're generally correct, but it's too easy to take this advice and turn it into "my project has external value because I invested my time and energy into it". Because that's the labor theory of value and it breeds jealousy and discontent, as people who worked smarter than you reaped more rewards. Part of the problem that most capitalist societies deal with is that value is perceived largely through how much money it is worth, which is an external measure of value. The insight is that we cannot allow our internal measure of worth to be dictated by how much it's externally worth; we have to define that internal sense of worth by and for ourselves. We have to be able to say, "this project is worth something to me because I invested my time and effort into it, and if it's not worth something to you, that's OK too, because I don't get to dictate to you what something is worth to you just because I devoted my energy to it, but in the meantime, my energy is worth something to me, and as such devoting my energy into a project makes it worth something to me, and that makes the daily effort Good."
• rojoca 10y ago
  Yes! A lot of the time people can't finish things because they don't know or can't decide what to actually do next. Having another person around to validate decisions or even just make them can be a great help. Bringing people together who will listen to and respect each other is the skill of team building.
• taeric 10y ago
  I wish I could just super underline your point on favoring individualism. We have systems built to make the best individuals that we can, and wonder why it is hard to join teams later in life. We'll even have times where we put people in teams, but then they still get judged individually. Completely ignoring that a failed team is just that, a failed team. Not a team of failures.
• jldugger 10y ago
  > It is a terrible thing that our educational system favors so much individualism, even when most important work Do you recall doing group projects in school ever? I do. They're poorly designed by faculty, most of whom have little experience other than working alone all day in front of a class of 30. Individuals are graded as a group, so the group average quality affects your individual grade. And with little way of enforcing norms, the group average effort also affects your individual grade. A clever shirker will reveal themselves early enough to motivate their teammates into covering their missing contribution. There's techniques to mitigate this, but I'd say 1 in 10 faculty cares about this, 2 in 10 heard that group work is critical to industry and the other 8 just figure grading 6 group projects is easier than grading 30.
  • bsder 10y ago
    > Do you recall doing group projects in school ever? I do. They're poorly designed by faculty, most of whom have little experience other than working alone all day in front of a class of 30. And they are poorly executed by students because they don't really have anything like a job at stake. I don't do group classes when I teach. There is no way for me as the "manager" to actually impact the group dynamics. So, grading 6 groups is WAY harder than 30 individuals. However, I make sure that assignments build on one another. By the end of the semester, practically every student curses themselves for how crappy the code they wrote at the beginning of the semester was. Nothing drives home why you should write better code than being both the producer and consumer of crappy code.
  • emiliobumachar 10y ago
    Good points, but there's some value in learning the averaging effect that much. About the crucial importance of choosing good teammates. About the limitations of the individual in overcoming a bad team.