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Building Great Products Through Anarchy

32 points by scribu 12y ago

low-fi 12y ago
Interesting take on development
logfromblammo 12y ago
Much like political anarchy, it either works really well and everyone is happy with it, or it is conquered by the King of Tonga and subsides back into the ocean. Or Mr. Humungus (who sounds like a reasonable feller) tries to take the gasoline truck. Or everyone in the company dies from tubercuthrax. But it wasn't exactly anarchy, was it? If you leave 18 baseball players to their own devices for a whole Saturday, on a baseball field, with a stack of baseballs, gloves, and bats, you will probably come back to discover that they played at least one game of baseball. It's only half the story if we don't know how the Guardian assembled its development team.
- ConfuciusSay 12y ago
  Yeah, it has very little to do with actual anarchy. A clickbait title in my HN? gasp
  - snitko 12y ago
    Actual anarchy is not chaos, it's non reliance on authority.
    - logfromblammo 12y ago
      Except in this case, the authority has predetermined the roles of the team, and has its hand on the money faucet the whole time. This wasn't a condition of no authority, it was a condition of minimal interference by the authority, which is more aptly termed laissez-faire, from the French for "let [them] do [it]". The article describes placing a ball at the top of a hill, and conveys a sort of perplexed astonishment that it reaches the bottom without needing any additional pushing.
      - snitko 12y ago
        Nobody forced them to participate. There are many employers out there. Developers could find other jobs had they wished so. An employer cannot be considered an authority because he and the employee enter a job contract voluntarily and both have choices.
        logfromblammo 12y ago
        An employer-employee relationship is inherently authoritative. It is literally an arrangement wherein the employee agrees to do as the employer commands, in exchange for an agreed-upon amount of money. The non-authoritative equivalent would be offering a bounty for the desired work, or granting a patronage gift to members of a development team, in the hopes that they produce something pleasing to the patron, and gift it in return. Such arrangements are practically nonexistent, because most businesses prefer to be authoritative. The modal corporate structure is a command hierarchy, wherein the board of directors selects a chief executive, who commands the other C-level executives, who command their middle managers, who command their floor managers, who command the workers. This is so common that I don't even know what sort of business structure is next when ordered by frequency. Per-unit payments to qualified independent contractors? Employee-owned co-op? Municipal utility managed by elected citizens' board? I have no idea. Practically every company I do business with is a corporation with a command hierarchy, where every command potentially comes with an expected value calculation including the cost to issue it and the expected revenue if it is obeyed. I uncertain as to what confusion of ideas led you to believe that an employer-employee relationship is non-authoritative, but I think that you may be presuming that having choices is the same as having freedom. It is not.
        dragonwriter 12y ago
        > Employee-owned co-op? Employee-owned co-ops often follow the same corporate structure, except that the board is elected by the coop members (generally, non-probationary employees).
        logfromblammo 12y ago
- otakucode 12y ago
  I don't think it bears much resemblance to political anarchy. "Developer anarchy" has a very different character. When you gather together a group of random people and call it a 'society', the outcome is very unpredictable. When you gather together a group of people whose pre-declared passion is creating neat software, the outcome is far less unpredictable. This sort of 'anarchy' should better be referred to as 'trust software developers to know how to develop software'. Most organizations are orgies of people with severe control fetishes, and they've convinced themselves that nothing beneficial to the company can be done without their interference. Perhaps they're wrong. Perhaps software engineers like to work on good software, and will therefore produce good software when not forced to jump through ridiculous hoops and fall to every new management fad? I know that when I am free to do whatever I wish, I try to create software I can be proud of. When involved in an organizations process, I am usually just trying to fix something so it's not broken, and there's not even an opportunity to propose building a better alternative, even if it would have significant business benefits. The software engineering industry seems to be obsessed with the idea that everyone except software engineers knows best how and what should be built.
  - logfromblammo 12y ago
    It was just a rhetorical device. I was evoking hyperbolic images of actual anarchy to illustrate how different they are from the conditions in the article. This wasn't anarchy at all. It's even a bit insulting that they decided to call it that. It's almost as if management folks resent the ability of development teams to finish things without their guidance/interference, and wish to poison the well with loaded prejudicial terms.
andkon 12y ago
I'd be interested to see what sort of anarchy would happen without a product manager picking which features fit and didn't. The premise of 'developer anarchy' seems to suggest that they'd figure it out - but I wonder how long it would take if there wasn't one person who could call something out-of-scope.

32 points by scribu 12y ago

Interesting take on development

Much like political anarchy, it either works really well and everyone is happy with it, or it is conquered by the King of Tonga and subsides back into the ocean. Or Mr. Humungus (who sounds like a reasonable feller) tries to take the gasoline truck. Or everyone in the company dies from tubercuthrax. But it wasn't exactly anarchy, was it? If you leave 18 baseball players to their own devices for a whole Saturday, on a baseball field, with a stack of baseballs, gloves, and bats, you will probably come back to discover that they played at least one game of baseball. It's only half the story if we don't know how the Guardian assembled its development team.

ConfuciusSay 12y ago
Yeah, it has very little to do with actual anarchy. A clickbait title in my HN? gasp
- snitko 12y ago
  Actual anarchy is not chaos, it's non reliance on authority.
  - logfromblammo 12y ago
    Except in this case, the authority has predetermined the roles of the team, and has its hand on the money faucet the whole time. This wasn't a condition of no authority, it was a condition of minimal interference by the authority, which is more aptly termed laissez-faire, from the French for "let [them] do [it]". The article describes placing a ball at the top of a hill, and conveys a sort of perplexed astonishment that it reaches the bottom without needing any additional pushing.
    - snitko 12y ago
      Nobody forced them to participate. There are many employers out there. Developers could find other jobs had they wished so. An employer cannot be considered an authority because he and the employee enter a job contract voluntarily and both have choices.
      - logfromblammo 12y ago
        An employer-employee relationship is inherently authoritative. It is literally an arrangement wherein the employee agrees to do as the employer commands, in exchange for an agreed-upon amount of money. The non-authoritative equivalent would be offering a bounty for the desired work, or granting a patronage gift to members of a development team, in the hopes that they produce something pleasing to the patron, and gift it in return. Such arrangements are practically nonexistent, because most businesses prefer to be authoritative. The modal corporate structure is a command hierarchy, wherein the board of directors selects a chief executive, who commands the other C-level executives, who command their middle managers, who command their floor managers, who command the workers. This is so common that I don't even know what sort of business structure is next when ordered by frequency. Per-unit payments to qualified independent contractors? Employee-owned co-op? Municipal utility managed by elected citizens' board? I have no idea. Practically every company I do business with is a corporation with a command hierarchy, where every command potentially comes with an expected value calculation including the cost to issue it and the expected revenue if it is obeyed. I uncertain as to what confusion of ideas led you to believe that an employer-employee relationship is non-authoritative, but I think that you may be presuming that having choices is the same as having freedom. It is not.
        dragonwriter 12y ago
        > Employee-owned co-op? Employee-owned co-ops often follow the same corporate structure, except that the board is elected by the coop members (generally, non-probationary employees).
        logfromblammo 12y ago
otakucode 12y ago
I don't think it bears much resemblance to political anarchy. "Developer anarchy" has a very different character. When you gather together a group of random people and call it a 'society', the outcome is very unpredictable. When you gather together a group of people whose pre-declared passion is creating neat software, the outcome is far less unpredictable. This sort of 'anarchy' should better be referred to as 'trust software developers to know how to develop software'. Most organizations are orgies of people with severe control fetishes, and they've convinced themselves that nothing beneficial to the company can be done without their interference. Perhaps they're wrong. Perhaps software engineers like to work on good software, and will therefore produce good software when not forced to jump through ridiculous hoops and fall to every new management fad? I know that when I am free to do whatever I wish, I try to create software I can be proud of. When involved in an organizations process, I am usually just trying to fix something so it's not broken, and there's not even an opportunity to propose building a better alternative, even if it would have significant business benefits. The software engineering industry seems to be obsessed with the idea that everyone except software engineers knows best how and what should be built.
- logfromblammo 12y ago
  It was just a rhetorical device. I was evoking hyperbolic images of actual anarchy to illustrate how different they are from the conditions in the article. This wasn't anarchy at all. It's even a bit insulting that they decided to call it that. It's almost as if management folks resent the ability of development teams to finish things without their guidance/interference, and wish to poison the well with loaded prejudicial terms.

andkon 12y ago

I'd be interested to see what sort of anarchy would happen without a product manager picking which features fit and didn't. The premise of 'developer anarchy' seems to suggest that they'd figure it out - but I wonder how long it would take if there wasn't one person who could call something out-of-scope.