3 ms·

Any non-trivial engineering or research is a team effort. It's good to have a mix of perspectives and temperaments in a team to keep poeple creative and honest.

Any non-trivial engineering or research is a team effort. It's good to have a mix of perspectives and temperaments in a team to keep poeple creative and honest. But the team ultimately has to cohere in order to deliver. That's really the core job of a manager: to create an environment where people can work together meaningfully and direct it to productive ends.

alexvitkov 2y ago
> Any non-trivial engineering or research is a team effort There's plenty of counterexamples in the software space, to the point where most great software was originally written by a single person - C, Unix, Linux, Git, TeX, Python, Ruby, Perl, SQLite, QEMU... Most of these now have huge teams maintaining them of course, but the initial research and engineering that was needed to come up with the golden egg is usually a one man show. C designed by committee is COBOL.
greatpostman 2y ago
This isn’t true, most of the best software is written by individuals. Even inside large tech companies, it still happens that major value is created by one person.
seanmcdirmid 2y ago
I totally empathize with this, but there are hardly many people managers who can pull that off. And often those that can get promoted up quickly so that they aren’t managing teams directly anymore. It is much easier to produce with mediocre people managers with a team of socially well adjusted mediocre programmers, than a unicorn people manager with a diverse team of highly skilled programmers who aren’t necessarily great at social skills. Individual efforts are completely different. A programmer like Notch can produce Minecraft on his own and then just get help to push it into a maintained product. This happens all the time, but you can’t produce that easily (and definitely not consistently) at the big corp level.

3 ms·

Any non-trivial engineering or research is a team effort. It's good to have a mix of perspectives and temperaments in a team to keep poeple creative and honest.

by the_snooze 2y ago

alexvitkov 2y ago
> Any non-trivial engineering or research is a team effort There's plenty of counterexamples in the software space, to the point where most great software was originally written by a single person - C, Unix, Linux, Git, TeX, Python, Ruby, Perl, SQLite, QEMU... Most of these now have huge teams maintaining them of course, but the initial research and engineering that was needed to come up with the golden egg is usually a one man show. C designed by committee is COBOL.
greatpostman 2y ago
This isn’t true, most of the best software is written by individuals. Even inside large tech companies, it still happens that major value is created by one person.
seanmcdirmid 2y ago
I totally empathize with this, but there are hardly many people managers who can pull that off. And often those that can get promoted up quickly so that they aren’t managing teams directly anymore. It is much easier to produce with mediocre people managers with a team of socially well adjusted mediocre programmers, than a unicorn people manager with a diverse team of highly skilled programmers who aren’t necessarily great at social skills. Individual efforts are completely different. A programmer like Notch can produce Minecraft on his own and then just get help to push it into a maintained product. This happens all the time, but you can’t produce that easily (and definitely not consistently) at the big corp level.