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Just a word about the Marine analogy in case some manager sees this and gets all excited: Team work is much more natural if you are up against an external enem
by qamark 6y ago
Just a word about the Marine analogy in case some manager sees this and gets all excited:
Team work is much more natural if you are up against an external enemy in the broadest sense, like the military, farming, building an aircraft or a group of physicists taming nature.
It does NOT work for creative endeavours with a) a distinct amount of self-expression like programming or writing novels that b) also require enormous amounts of context in the working memory. This is why developers get into fights that easily.
(Please don't counter with "the humble programmer" and all that; we know, and Dijkstra himself wasn't humble.
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- mattzito 6y agoI agree with this perspective - the closest thing I've seen to this sort of "external enemy" approach in tech is engineers/SREs responding to an outage/critical issue. Good teams will get into a state of flow where people are subdividing work, prioritizing, working as a cohesive unit. In that case, there is a clear objective (get things back up and running) with a clear enemy (that DDoS/database/down payment gateway/datacenter power outage).
- randomswede 6y agoI have experienced it both as part of IT emergency response, as well as when cooking with (a very small subset) other people. As long as everyone is "on the same wavelength" (I am sorry, I cannot quantify that better), it is basically effortless. You need someone to chop onions, and a few minutes later, they're just there. You sense that someone needs a filleting knife (they're just about to place a fish on a cutting board, or something similar that signals "this is the next tool needed") and you're close to it, so you make sure it is there for them (handle first, of course). It is a very similar feeling to a well-integrated infantry unit making an entry into a presumed-hostile building, minus all the adrenaline.
- scruple 6y ago> Team work is much more natural if you are up against an external enemy in the broadest sense This is why I've always found it frightening when some management type starts talking about the book Extreme Ownership. I am a veteran, though I was not SOF, and I have strong opinions about why military management mindsets do not translate well to the business world in _most_ cases. To be fair, I have not read the book, but from what I have heard from those who have read it, I would be wary of anyone trying to apply it to a software engineering shop.
- caffeine 6y agoThink you might be pleasantly surprised... concepts like “extreme ownership” (care about everything in your stack), “decentralised command” (push decision making to those doing the work), “cover and move” (help each other) actually translate pretty well. The book is mostly about dealing with people rather than about engineering process, and I think the people aspects of a coding team and any other high performance team probably have a lot in common.