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It's interesting that you say your bias is toward perceiving someone self-reporting as working on a team as "everyone on the team did the work but me". Does th

It's interesting that you say your bias is toward perceiving someone self-reporting as working on a team as "everyone on the team did the work but me". Does this result from primarily working alone, or have you just been granted license to be more autonomous than most coders I know? A lot of shops both employ pair programming and have a series of pairs working on one project, or have a t the very least a bunch of people working on different aspects of the project. Of course this could be spun as "I did y for my project, x" but I'm curious as to why "As part of the team working on x project, I did y" sounds less like accomplishing something technical to you. Say I had a project out of which I'm submitting 3-4 conference papers to various conferences for publication, working with my advisor and another student. Would it be better to say I did it all, or to be honest and say the other student did 1/3, I did 2/3, and my advisor helped shape our vision?

api 12y ago
I have often worked alone, but not always. I've never worked in a pair programming shop, and I would probably find it distracting for anything but debugging or syncing up. The trouble is that complex programming tasks usually have the nature where communicating the ideas takes longer than simply coding them. You'd spend all your time syncing state between you and the other person. But I don't think this explains the bias. I'm not really sure where it comes from but I found it interesting.
nemothekid 12y ago
I felt the same as 'api' when he explained that and to me, it came from my bad experiences working on teams, in high school, where 1 or 2 people did all the work and the rest rode the coattails to an easy A. Of course my experiences in high school shouldn't factor into my judgement of reading judging peoples capabilities (because chances are everyone worked on a team that did X). Something like that might just be a hidden cultural bias - I'm sure everyone has an experience where they forced to worked with others who didn't feel like pulling their weight - and its those negative experiences that shape our notions of what it means to work on a team, rather than the multitude of positive experiences we may have had.

api 12y ago

I have often worked alone, but not always. I've never worked in a pair programming shop, and I would probably find it distracting for anything but debugging or syncing up. The trouble is that complex programming tasks usually have the nature where communicating the ideas takes longer than simply coding them. You'd spend all your time syncing state between you and the other person. But I don't think this explains the bias. I'm not really sure where it comes from but I found it interesting.

nemothekid 12y ago

I felt the same as 'api' when he explained that and to me, it came from my bad experiences working on teams, in high school, where 1 or 2 people did all the work and the rest rode the coattails to an easy A. Of course my experiences in high school shouldn't factor into my judgement of reading judging peoples capabilities (because chances are everyone worked on a team that did X). Something like that might just be a hidden cultural bias - I'm sure everyone has an experience where they forced to worked with others who didn't feel like pulling their weight - and its those negative experiences that shape our notions of what it means to work on a team, rather than the multitude of positive experiences we may have had.