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This is a difficult problem with too many complex human factors. The guilty actor may have a conscience, but without suitable creative channels, opts instead fo
by pirateking 13y ago
This is a difficult problem with too many complex human factors. The guilty actor may have a conscience, but without suitable creative channels, opts instead for basic survival in the organization by whatever means necessary. Or they might just be an asshole whose crowning meta output is exposing a broken organization.
An idea I have thought about is having a culture of individual demos. Being put on the spot sucks, but taking responsibility and pride in your work is an important step to encouraging those who do to grow and shine, and forcing those who don't out of the shadows. Demos do not necessarily have to be presentations on stage under a spotlight - they can be of any format including videos, drawings, research papers, or distributed software.
For this to work though, the demos cannot just be some adjunct ritual to the organization's "real work", with the sole purpose of name and shame. The demos must be the byproduct of your entire work in the organization. What sprouts from the individual demos, may lead to improvised teams for larger projects, but the demos are always the driving force, there to empower the individual and their ideas.
- ionforce 13y agoI kinda like this idea. But I wonder if it overly penalizes people who are bad at or fearful of public speaking. Have you heard of any organizations that implement something like this?
- pirateking 13y agoNo public speaking required - demos can be code, writing, or whatever mediums you are comfortable with. The idea is influenced by various stories I have heard over the years about Valve, Pixar, and Apple. Not sure if any company currently implements such a system.
- foobarian 13y agoI work at a company using something to this effect--when engineers get assigned projects they "own" them completely--from design and implementation to testing, deployment, verification, and bugs. We have a semi-formal tracking app with names attached to projects. There is never more than one person working on something. I think this instills a great culture of responsibility and accountability. It makes it very hard for someone to ride on others' coattails or not pull their weight, as you might get in a forced pair programming team, or a larger group.
- pirateking 13y agoVery interesting. Sounds like DRI (Directly Responsible Individual) at Apple. Are there any manager type roles (who does the assigning of projects to engineers)?
- ionforce 13y agoHow do you handle bus factor and what not? Or are you just saying... they're responsible, but other people are helping them?
- foobarian 13y agoMaybe it's not an issue because it's a web company, and it doesn't take a rocket scientist to ramp up on any given module or system in the codebase. Typical flow handled by one person is about 3 weeks from start of coding to live code, and then a couple more weeks on followup, stats, bugs, etc. After that it's just part of the codebase and others can end up working on it; but they'd probably talk to the original author to get up to speed.