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I have been watching teams form and succeed -- or die -- for a long time. I'm very close to believing that you'd be better off with hiring smart people right o

I have been watching teams form and succeed -- or die -- for a long time. I'm very close to believing that you'd be better off with hiring smart people right off the street who have never worked in IT -- but get along great and truly care and help each other out -- than you would trying to screen out folks who know algorithms and/or data structures and then filter a second time for not being a douchebag. I have seen a lot of average ability teams who had social skills kick ass. I've never seen a team with tremendously smart people without them do so. In fact, I continue to be amazed at the brilliant people I meet sometime whom I wouldn't want bagging groceries for me, much less creating an web application. ADD: If anybody's interested in running an experiment where we create teams basically out of thin air, hit me up. I've been kicking around some ideas in this space for a couple of years or so.

lifeisstillgood 11y ago
Why an experiment? It sounds like a very good pitch for a project services company.
- DanielBMarkham 11y ago
  I have no personal desire to start or run a project services company, so it's not something I would fund. My interest is from the standpoint of understanding and accelerating how teams perform. (Or don't) Also there's an interesting relationship between the people, the team, and the company. As it turns out, all are important equally, just in different ways. You really need a pre-existing company to do this. Finally, I don't care what anybody tells you, work in this area is experimental. Everybody and their brother has a pet theory and most of it is based on limited/non-existent sample sizes or the conflating a plethora of data with an abundance of understanding. If people were robots, we'd just hire robots.
  - lifeisstillgood 11y ago
    Apologies my HN response time drops when I go on holiday. I was not meaning you should start a "normal" project services company - more that most such companies just grab semi-random contractors and throw them into the latest contract, meaning a company that made experimentation the basis of its allocation may have a both a commercial attraction and greater scale than ordinary lab-scale experiments. Not that I know what you are planning so it's likely to be off target. (Well actually your second sentence suggests taking existing teams in existing company)

lifeisstillgood 11y ago

Why an experiment? It sounds like a very good pitch for a project services company.

DanielBMarkham 11y ago
I have no personal desire to start or run a project services company, so it's not something I would fund. My interest is from the standpoint of understanding and accelerating how teams perform. (Or don't) Also there's an interesting relationship between the people, the team, and the company. As it turns out, all are important equally, just in different ways. You really need a pre-existing company to do this. Finally, I don't care what anybody tells you, work in this area is experimental. Everybody and their brother has a pet theory and most of it is based on limited/non-existent sample sizes or the conflating a plethora of data with an abundance of understanding. If people were robots, we'd just hire robots.
- lifeisstillgood 11y ago
  Apologies my HN response time drops when I go on holiday. I was not meaning you should start a "normal" project services company - more that most such companies just grab semi-random contractors and throw them into the latest contract, meaning a company that made experimentation the basis of its allocation may have a both a commercial attraction and greater scale than ordinary lab-scale experiments. Not that I know what you are planning so it's likely to be off target. (Well actually your second sentence suggests taking existing teams in existing company)