4 ms·

His definition is what you would expect in most work settings. For example, on a team of 5 individual contributors who were supposed to be peers, were paid the

• jimmaswell 4y ago
  20% of the people doing 80% of the work wouldn't actually be that surprising. The Pareto Principle applies to a lot of cases.
  • jonahx 4y ago
    It would be surprising if someone that high-performing weren't promoted into a different role. My claim isn't that such differences don't exist among people... only that we don't say such a group is "collaborating", which (to me) typically connotes some roughly equal breakdown of work. We say that the group has a leader, or that it is "A's project, but X, Y, and Z are helping a little." The OP's thesis is that the rhetoric around "tens of millions of people collaborating to produce OSS" is misleading, and I think his point is fair. Most people would be surprised to see how single-individual-heavy the actual production is.
    • bawolff 4y ago
      I don't think anyone uses collaborating to mean "collaborating equally". The idea that "tens of millions of people collaborating [exactly equally] to produce OSS" is so obviously not true, its hard to imagine anyone seriously believes that.
• barry-cotter 4y ago
  That doesn’t sound out of the ordinary. You’d expect them to get promoted, a large raise or switch to a better (paying) company but those kinds of differences in performance sound normal.
• bawolff 4y ago
  In a work setting not everyone is paid the same and not everyone provides the same value. In open source, people aren't paid, which isn't equivalent to being paid "equally". Some do more than others. I feel like in a work setting, the equivalent would be saying it is not collaborative because senior employees are more productive than the interns.