4 ms·

If you think active, in-person collaboration is a "minor optimization" than it doesn't feel like you're starting from a neutral, open position on this issue.

by skeeter2020 5y ago

anonymoushn 5y ago
It seems like someone could start at a neutral, open position and reasonably arrive at that conclusion. Some users commented upthread that IRL whiteboarding is good but infrequent. This matches my experience. I think real productive IRL knowledge transfer or collaboration has been a once-a-month thing for most of my career, and the downsides of doing it in some sort of virtual environment seem smaller than the downsides of spending 1-2 hours per day for everyone. As an aside, I sort of wonder why the best WoW guilds are fully remote, if in-person collaboration is such an advantage. I spent some time as an IC in one of the best guilds in the world, and being remote didn't seem like such a big deal. Later I spent some time in a leadership position in a much less serious guild (basically as bad as a guild could be and still clear the hardest content in the game) and if you told me I could have everyone in my team spend many hours per week in cars so that we could all hang out together in real life or spend that time learning about how the best players of their classes deal with upcoming encounters, it seems like it would be an easy choice. One might reasonably respond "Well, software is not like world of warcraft! Software is a lot more collaborative!" but in general the level of planning and ad-hoc coordination that goes into boss kills is unrivaled in software outside of companies like Pivotal Labs that spend an entire day on planning each week, communicate liberally throughout the day, and don't seem to end up with substantially more output than other companies as a result. I sort of wonder if this attitude is a cultural accident where much of the discipline of software engineering is made up of people who think that it's bad for people to take time to develop deep expertise in a subject area or people who have allocated so many people to a project that there isn't enough independent-ish work to go around.
wink 5y ago
As usual, it depends. Imagine a team that sat in one room, communication was terrible. People never had time for questions. Queue the pandemic and everyone working from home and suddenly communication improves tremendously, people who you'd have to pester endlessly for a review or ask about some code they wrote suddenly answer the same day. Your team lead is not on the phone in the room where you're trying to work.

If you think active, in-person collaboration is a "minor optimization" than it doesn't feel like you're starting from a neutral, open position on this issue.

anonymoushn 5y ago

It seems like someone could start at a neutral, open position and reasonably arrive at that conclusion. Some users commented upthread that IRL whiteboarding is good but infrequent. This matches my experience. I think real productive IRL knowledge transfer or collaboration has been a once-a-month thing for most of my career, and the downsides of doing it in some sort of virtual environment seem smaller than the downsides of spending 1-2 hours per day for everyone. As an aside, I sort of wonder why the best WoW guilds are fully remote, if in-person collaboration is such an advantage. I spent some time as an IC in one of the best guilds in the world, and being remote didn't seem like such a big deal. Later I spent some time in a leadership position in a much less serious guild (basically as bad as a guild could be and still clear the hardest content in the game) and if you told me I could have everyone in my team spend many hours per week in cars so that we could all hang out together in real life or spend that time learning about how the best players of their classes deal with upcoming encounters, it seems like it would be an easy choice. One might reasonably respond "Well, software is not like world of warcraft! Software is a lot more collaborative!" but in general the level of planning and ad-hoc coordination that goes into boss kills is unrivaled in software outside of companies like Pivotal Labs that spend an entire day on planning each week, communicate liberally throughout the day, and don't seem to end up with substantially more output than other companies as a result. I sort of wonder if this attitude is a cultural accident where much of the discipline of software engineering is made up of people who think that it's bad for people to take time to develop deep expertise in a subject area or people who have allocated so many people to a project that there isn't enough independent-ish work to go around.

wink 5y ago

As usual, it depends. Imagine a team that sat in one room, communication was terrible. People never had time for questions. Queue the pandemic and everyone working from home and suddenly communication improves tremendously, people who you'd have to pester endlessly for a review or ask about some code they wrote suddenly answer the same day. Your team lead is not on the phone in the room where you're trying to work.