3 ms·
You work to raise your teammates up. Full stop. Productivity for a team is in aggregate - it's the entire teams productivity that's at stake, not an individual
by jayroh 10y ago
You work to raise your teammates up. Full stop. Productivity for a team is in aggregate - it's the entire teams productivity that's at stake, not an individual contributor's.
- dasmoth 10y agoThis seems to be a pretty ubiquitous view nowadays, but neglects the possibility that some projects might go better with an individual contributor just getting on with it.
- chillacy 10y agoAn interesting analogy is the tradeoffs in going from one machine to a distributed system: a single SQL server will outperform a 3 node cluster for small loads, but the 3 node cluster will survive hardware failures and eventually out-scale the single-node setup as you add more nodes. It feels like larger companies are always reluctant to have a single point of failure, whether it's a machine in Utah going down or Greg getting hit by a bus.
- dasmoth 10y agoIt's a good analogy. Setting up the three-node cluster is an awful lot more work, and if you don't do it right there's a real chance that you'll end up with lower real-world reliability than the single node. That said, I can understand why large companies worry about single points of failure. What perplexes me more is that the you-always-need-a-team mindset is filtering down to smaller and smaller organisations.
- alexandercrohde 10y agoNo, you work to get great stuff done. Whether or not your teammates are a worthwhile investment (or whether they even belong at the company at all) is a complicated calculation. In this case the author describes a jerk who's more effective than the rest of the team combined. In this case, I kind of wonder whether it was a mistake hiring such a team.
- manigandham 10y agoThat's not how reality works. People are self-interested. The team is secondary, at best. This isn't war, it's software development.