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I think there is a major framing issue here. Speaking for myself, and the many colleagues I’ve spoken to about this, collaboration isn’t the issue. “Collabora

I think there is a major framing issue here. Speaking for myself, and the many colleagues I’ve spoken to about this, collaboration isn’t the issue. “Collaboration” is the issue. I’ve had some of my most meaningful (and happiness-inducing) experiences at work when collaborating deeply with colleagues. I’ve had some of the most frustrating experiences at work when “collaborating”. The distinction simply being: “Collaboration” in the form of “interacting in realtime” or “existing in the same space” can also be 99% distraction. “Real” collaboration - the kind where the collective consciousness of the group results in outcomes that could not have been achieved solo - is where the magic lies. I’m absolutely happier with more autonomy and less distraction. But that is not the antithesis of collaboration. A pendulum that swings too far in the other direction will leave folks feeling isolated, and will reduce the potential of a group. Finding the right balance and distinguishing between real collaborative interaction vs. “acting out” something that looks like collaboration on the surface is critical.

jokethrowaway 4y ago
Collaboration has its place for when you need it. Sure, you can get great results despite paying the mental cost of collaborating (which is even higher if it's happening through a computer screen). The problem is that we see the great results of occasional collaboration and we want more of that. Creating more artificial collaboration when you're capable of doing the task by yourself will just be expensive (both in terms of salary and mental health): it's not the answer.
- haswell 4y ago
  > Sure, you can get great results despite paying the mental cost of collaborating When I refer to the beneficial kind of collaboration, I’m referring to the kind where the cost of not collaborating is to not achieve the outcome at all. Paul McCartney is an excellent musician on his own. The Beatles achieved something as a group that no individual can achieve on their own. I agree that adding collaboration in a setting that doesn’t require it just adds mental cost. But in other settings, that mental cost is minimal compared to the enhanced output. > Creating more artificial collaboration when you're capable of doing the task by yourself will just be expensive We’re on the same page here. That’s what I mean by “Collaboration” in quotes. The kind that is not necessary. My main point/issue is that the article doesn’t seem to really acknowledge or explore that there is a good/bad kind. Just focusing on “employees need more time to do their actual work” is not useful if that employee’s actual work actually does require some form of collaboration. The ability to distinguish between the two seems to be the core issue that requires exploration.
- diarrhea 4y ago
  This is a great insight. Mapping productivity over collaboration intensity is a concave function. Its maximum is nowhere near the extreme ends. Yet, if people are near the maximum they might desire more of what has worked in getting them there, but to their right they’ll only find decline. This is such a common fallacy I wonder if it has a name.
xboxnolifes 4y ago
"Collaboration" is the kind where someone read an article about a team building a successful project with lots of collaboration once, so they mandate pair programming on every ticket and mob testing for every PR.
matwood 4y ago
They probably could have just shortened it to autonomy. Collaboration is great when it’s not forced - hence autonomy. I also like to call autonomy to being treated like an adult. So much of what companies do is infantilizing now.
- baxtr 4y ago
  > infantilizing Curious to understand this better. Could you give some examples?
  - matwood 4y ago
    Waffle parties and Hawaiian shirt days come to mind.
  - darkmarmot 4y ago
    There are thousands of examples if you work for a paternalistic megacorp. Case in point, our office now lets people "hotel" at desks, but we have to reserve them for time slots. We could, like the library, just sit and use unoccupied desks. But they add this level of control that's geared towards toddlers that can't operate in a shared public space.
    - baxtr 4y ago
      Must be annoying… Sounds like a poorly communicated capacity planning thing though?
      - anonymoushn 4y ago
        Does the company need capacity planning in the form of making everyone do extra work instead of making one person glance around and report on the level of free desks or making a button one can click only when they tried to find a desk and couldn't?
        baxtr 4y ago
mrexroad 4y ago
Too many orgs conflate communication and collaboration. The heavy handed push for “Collaboration” always seems to stem from folks with anxiety around feeling left out, and leadership who is equally disconnected. E.g. “I’m hearing you’re not being very collaborative, spend more time bringing others along!” When really the problem is lack of communication and transparency creates fear/uncertainty/doubt. With that said, communication and coordination are the foundations for collaboration. Some orgs address those well, most don’t; too often it falls on the right interpersonal dynamics to create the environment for meaningful collaboration where 1+1=3.
tikhonj 4y ago
Exactly the same for me: some of my best work and most enjoyable time has been collaborating closely with people. And yet, some of my worst time has been in settings that can also be described as collaborative! What made a difference? I see it as having two types of "collaboration": working together vs working on the same thing in parallel. The problem is that the formal processes managers use to ostensibly encourage collaboration—and, of course, to track and direct individual work—push hard towards the latter model. Everybody working on their own tasks makes the work so much more legible! Having some other person or some process determine who works on what, when and then implicitly (or explicitly!) judging people based on how quickly they complete "their" tasks is not only awful for autonomy and job satisfaction but also actively makes it harder to collaborate meaningfully. I've worked on teams where people were afraid to spend too much time working together or helping each other because they didn't want to "waste" the other person's time—after all, you're clearly wasting time if you aren't consistently producing finished tickets!—which is absolutely toxic for creativity, culture and collaboration, but also a natural response to the incentives and structure imposed by the process. I'm gradually starting to look for my next job and finding a culture where I can actually collaborate is one of my main goals, but it seems hard to evaluate from the outside. It's not clear how much an individual manager can do to foster the right sort of environment—a lot depends on the culture and structure at higher levels on the organization, as well as cross-team interactions—and it's the sort of thing where everyone is going to say their team is collaborative (and even believe it), and I don't see how a team could show rather than just say that.
- skirmish 4y ago
  I work in a FAANG, and performance reviews are all about component ownership and getting other people to work for you (leadership!) but never ever about helping somebody else. What collaboration can we talk about when it is so explicitly discouraged by management?
more_corn 4y ago
Me in mind that at Microsoft and every large company. A lot of time is wasted in meetings. What you’re seeing is that the happiest workers AT Microsoft are the ones with more time for deep work and the ones with high autonomy. That lesson is probably generalizable. I don’t think anyone is suggesting an end to collaborative work.
closeparen 4y ago
Collaboration implies underlying work. Something the collaborators are doing together in addition to talking. The vast majority of the talking in my corporate environment either has no such referent, or is a one-sided accounting of the work you are doing up to someone whose job it is to allocate your time or supervise that work, not to personally advance it with you. A good litmus test is what someone's calendar looks like. People who are in wall to wall meetings every day (managers, Staff+ engineers, TPMs, etc) can never, properly speaking, collaborate, since there is no time where they could be doing the work being collaborated on. They have coordination and supervisory functions that may be valuable, even indispensable, but what they do is different from collaboration.
agumonkey 4y ago
a good collaboration aims at making parties very independent at some points. because you all shared the same outlook and plan and can now go on your own way until the next mental rendez-vous.

jokethrowaway 4y ago

Collaboration has its place for when you need it. Sure, you can get great results despite paying the mental cost of collaborating (which is even higher if it's happening through a computer screen). The problem is that we see the great results of occasional collaboration and we want more of that. Creating more artificial collaboration when you're capable of doing the task by yourself will just be expensive (both in terms of salary and mental health): it's not the answer.

haswell 4y ago
> Sure, you can get great results despite paying the mental cost of collaborating When I refer to the beneficial kind of collaboration, I’m referring to the kind where the cost of not collaborating is to not achieve the outcome at all. Paul McCartney is an excellent musician on his own. The Beatles achieved something as a group that no individual can achieve on their own. I agree that adding collaboration in a setting that doesn’t require it just adds mental cost. But in other settings, that mental cost is minimal compared to the enhanced output. > Creating more artificial collaboration when you're capable of doing the task by yourself will just be expensive We’re on the same page here. That’s what I mean by “Collaboration” in quotes. The kind that is not necessary. My main point/issue is that the article doesn’t seem to really acknowledge or explore that there is a good/bad kind. Just focusing on “employees need more time to do their actual work” is not useful if that employee’s actual work actually does require some form of collaboration. The ability to distinguish between the two seems to be the core issue that requires exploration.
diarrhea 4y ago
This is a great insight. Mapping productivity over collaboration intensity is a concave function. Its maximum is nowhere near the extreme ends. Yet, if people are near the maximum they might desire more of what has worked in getting them there, but to their right they’ll only find decline. This is such a common fallacy I wonder if it has a name.

xboxnolifes 4y ago

"Collaboration" is the kind where someone read an article about a team building a successful project with lots of collaboration once, so they mandate pair programming on every ticket and mob testing for every PR.

matwood 4y ago

They probably could have just shortened it to autonomy. Collaboration is great when it’s not forced - hence autonomy. I also like to call autonomy to being treated like an adult. So much of what companies do is infantilizing now.

baxtr 4y ago
> infantilizing Curious to understand this better. Could you give some examples?
- matwood 4y ago
  Waffle parties and Hawaiian shirt days come to mind.
- darkmarmot 4y ago
  There are thousands of examples if you work for a paternalistic megacorp. Case in point, our office now lets people "hotel" at desks, but we have to reserve them for time slots. We could, like the library, just sit and use unoccupied desks. But they add this level of control that's geared towards toddlers that can't operate in a shared public space.
  - baxtr 4y ago
    Must be annoying… Sounds like a poorly communicated capacity planning thing though?
    - anonymoushn 4y ago
      Does the company need capacity planning in the form of making everyone do extra work instead of making one person glance around and report on the level of free desks or making a button one can click only when they tried to find a desk and couldn't?
      - baxtr 4y ago

mrexroad 4y ago

Too many orgs conflate communication and collaboration. The heavy handed push for “Collaboration” always seems to stem from folks with anxiety around feeling left out, and leadership who is equally disconnected. E.g. “I’m hearing you’re not being very collaborative, spend more time bringing others along!” When really the problem is lack of communication and transparency creates fear/uncertainty/doubt. With that said, communication and coordination are the foundations for collaboration. Some orgs address those well, most don’t; too often it falls on the right interpersonal dynamics to create the environment for meaningful collaboration where 1+1=3.

tikhonj 4y ago

Exactly the same for me: some of my best work and most enjoyable time has been collaborating closely with people. And yet, some of my worst time has been in settings that can also be described as collaborative! What made a difference? I see it as having two types of "collaboration": working together vs working on the same thing in parallel. The problem is that the formal processes managers use to ostensibly encourage collaboration—and, of course, to track and direct individual work—push hard towards the latter model. Everybody working on their own tasks makes the work so much more legible! Having some other person or some process determine who works on what, when and then implicitly (or explicitly!) judging people based on how quickly they complete "their" tasks is not only awful for autonomy and job satisfaction but also actively makes it harder to collaborate meaningfully. I've worked on teams where people were afraid to spend too much time working together or helping each other because they didn't want to "waste" the other person's time—after all, you're clearly wasting time if you aren't consistently producing finished tickets!—which is absolutely toxic for creativity, culture and collaboration, but also a natural response to the incentives and structure imposed by the process. I'm gradually starting to look for my next job and finding a culture where I can actually collaborate is one of my main goals, but it seems hard to evaluate from the outside. It's not clear how much an individual manager can do to foster the right sort of environment—a lot depends on the culture and structure at higher levels on the organization, as well as cross-team interactions—and it's the sort of thing where everyone is going to say their team is collaborative (and even believe it), and I don't see how a team could show rather than just say that.

skirmish 4y ago
I work in a FAANG, and performance reviews are all about component ownership and getting other people to work for you (leadership!) but never ever about helping somebody else. What collaboration can we talk about when it is so explicitly discouraged by management?

more_corn 4y ago

Me in mind that at Microsoft and every large company. A lot of time is wasted in meetings. What you’re seeing is that the happiest workers AT Microsoft are the ones with more time for deep work and the ones with high autonomy. That lesson is probably generalizable. I don’t think anyone is suggesting an end to collaborative work.

closeparen 4y ago

Collaboration implies underlying work. Something the collaborators are doing together in addition to talking. The vast majority of the talking in my corporate environment either has no such referent, or is a one-sided accounting of the work you are doing up to someone whose job it is to allocate your time or supervise that work, not to personally advance it with you. A good litmus test is what someone's calendar looks like. People who are in wall to wall meetings every day (managers, Staff+ engineers, TPMs, etc) can never, properly speaking, collaborate, since there is no time where they could be doing the work being collaborated on. They have coordination and supervisory functions that may be valuable, even indispensable, but what they do is different from collaboration.

agumonkey 4y ago

a good collaboration aims at making parties very independent at some points. because you all shared the same outlook and plan and can now go on your own way until the next mental rendez-vous.