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There is a minor irony that the author has another blogpost on how micromanaging bosses are awful, because they insist that you should work their way rather tha

by Closi 3y ago

There is a minor irony that the author has another blogpost on how micromanaging bosses are awful, because they insist that you should work their way rather than your own way. Perhaps the learning here is just "managing engineers to deliver something cohesive isn't straightforward". It's obviously true that an open source project can have good coding standards with multiple contributors of different skill levels, but you get there by managing the project really well. And while more engineers can mean that an individual engineer is slower, the idea is that with good management and engineering the aggregate output can increase with each engineer (i.e. Having 10 engineers who only work at 25% of the pace of a standalone engineer will still output 2.5x as much as a single engineer. At scale it is the teams output that matters, not the output of an individual engineer).

stakhanov 3y ago
> There is a minor irony that the author has another blogpost on how micromanaging bosses are awful... It's not as contradictory as it sounds, to complain both about micromanaging bosses and about underlings kidnapping projects. But one needs to switch the framing from universal truths about team organization to psychology. I can relate to the situation quite closely because I think it's the same overall situation that I find myself in. I might be totally off the mark here because, like anyone, I can't read minds, but let me engage in some speculation. The ability to have truly peer-to-peer relationships that are not based on any one side dominating the other is very rare. One needs to have a highly developed psyche to be capable of such relationships, so only a small minority of people have this ability. The vast majority of all human relationships work on a "dominate or be dominated" principle. If you consistently find yourself on the losing end of power struggle, you start to see everyone as a threat to your autonomy. The result is that you work alone. Obviously, that's extremely limiting, and, for myself, I find it extremely painful to try to develop through that.
kazinator 3y ago
Well, yes; his way is the best. Not the boss's way, and not the way of some meddling coworkers that want to form a team around the project. It's perfectly consistent. The centre of the org chart is the (ME) bubble, surrounded by meddlers and interlopers.
- Applejinx 3y ago
  It sounds like he's spelled out a pretty distinct goal. "I want to create a platform that can be run from a tiny, low-power server running on a home Internet connection. My primary goal for Xnet is to prove that--contrary to everything everyone else says--one does not need a huge, expensive server on a super-fast Internet connection to host a social network with tens of thousands of users. The reason I want to demonstrate this with a real-world example running live on the Internet is to help average people understand that free speech on the Internet does not have to disappear. Anyone of even less-than-average means can help take it back from billionaires like Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk. This is not a hard vision to understand. I think spreading this message is much more important than anything I could contribute to society with one social network run by me. While I am sure that scaling up Xnet would have been a fun project for the latest person to offer his help, this is not what the project is about." I can't fault this at all. Doesn't mean it has to be my goal (though what I do has many common factors), but from where I'm standing he's doing all the right things, in the right way, and making the right choices around them. Now, the catch is: part of his goal is making 'average people' take back control of social networks from giant networks that benefit from, well, network effects :) and spreading this message is fundamental to his goal. So from where I'm standing, his goal is literally unachievable. Average people will not understand or do this. Small groups of super-fans will do this, and they will fail to spread his message, they'll just carry it as well as they can. If anyone does spread it it will be by degrading it in exactly the way he fears, expanding it until it's serving far larger and less motivated populations and requiring specialized hosting, not just democratized average hosting. If he won't get 'average people' to replace Twitter and Facebook with self-hosting his platform, does that mean his platform shouldn't exist? I think it probably should exist, and that requires it to be his way.
  - kazinator 3y ago
    Average people can understand well enough that if they use someone's toy social site consisting of a single node with a tiny number of users, they will not have their egos stroked there with large numbers of "friends" or "followers" circle jerking their postings.
  - 3y ago

by Closi 3y ago

stakhanov 3y ago

> There is a minor irony that the author has another blogpost on how micromanaging bosses are awful... It's not as contradictory as it sounds, to complain both about micromanaging bosses and about underlings kidnapping projects. But one needs to switch the framing from universal truths about team organization to psychology. I can relate to the situation quite closely because I think it's the same overall situation that I find myself in. I might be totally off the mark here because, like anyone, I can't read minds, but let me engage in some speculation. The ability to have truly peer-to-peer relationships that are not based on any one side dominating the other is very rare. One needs to have a highly developed psyche to be capable of such relationships, so only a small minority of people have this ability. The vast majority of all human relationships work on a "dominate or be dominated" principle. If you consistently find yourself on the losing end of power struggle, you start to see everyone as a threat to your autonomy. The result is that you work alone. Obviously, that's extremely limiting, and, for myself, I find it extremely painful to try to develop through that.

kazinator 3y ago

Well, yes; his way is the best. Not the boss's way, and not the way of some meddling coworkers that want to form a team around the project. It's perfectly consistent. The centre of the org chart is the (ME) bubble, surrounded by meddlers and interlopers.

Applejinx 3y ago
It sounds like he's spelled out a pretty distinct goal. "I want to create a platform that can be run from a tiny, low-power server running on a home Internet connection. My primary goal for Xnet is to prove that--contrary to everything everyone else says--one does not need a huge, expensive server on a super-fast Internet connection to host a social network with tens of thousands of users. The reason I want to demonstrate this with a real-world example running live on the Internet is to help average people understand that free speech on the Internet does not have to disappear. Anyone of even less-than-average means can help take it back from billionaires like Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk. This is not a hard vision to understand. I think spreading this message is much more important than anything I could contribute to society with one social network run by me. While I am sure that scaling up Xnet would have been a fun project for the latest person to offer his help, this is not what the project is about." I can't fault this at all. Doesn't mean it has to be my goal (though what I do has many common factors), but from where I'm standing he's doing all the right things, in the right way, and making the right choices around them. Now, the catch is: part of his goal is making 'average people' take back control of social networks from giant networks that benefit from, well, network effects :) and spreading this message is fundamental to his goal. So from where I'm standing, his goal is literally unachievable. Average people will not understand or do this. Small groups of super-fans will do this, and they will fail to spread his message, they'll just carry it as well as they can. If anyone does spread it it will be by degrading it in exactly the way he fears, expanding it until it's serving far larger and less motivated populations and requiring specialized hosting, not just democratized average hosting. If he won't get 'average people' to replace Twitter and Facebook with self-hosting his platform, does that mean his platform shouldn't exist? I think it probably should exist, and that requires it to be his way.
- kazinator 3y ago
  Average people can understand well enough that if they use someone's toy social site consisting of a single node with a tiny number of users, they will not have their egos stroked there with large numbers of "friends" or "followers" circle jerking their postings.
- 3y ago