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[The] main problem here is that software development is not an individual sport. Assessing technical traits means that we are looking at candidates as individuals. At the same time, we will put them in a team context and the project's success will depend on their teamwork. A person's resume or LinkedIn profile says close to nothing about their team skills.
What's more, we know quite a lot about what makes teams effective. Anita Woolley's research on collective intelligence [DOI: 10.1126/science.1193147] [DX] provides extremely valuable insight on the topic. First of all, how do we define collective intelligence? It's basically the skill of a group to solve complex problems. Well, it sounds like the definition of everyday work for software development teams if you ask me.
Why is collective intelligence so important? Exploiting collective intelligence, as opposed to going with the opinion of the smartest person in a room, is a winning strategy. To put in Anita Woolley's words: "Collective intelligence was much more predictive in terms of succeeding in complex tasks than average individual intelligence or maximal individual intelligence."
(Score: 4, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday September 24 2017, @08:14PM (2 children)
This article takes their sample for all their data, and conclusions, from Google. This seems reasonable. It is not. The problem with this is that Google has their pick of the cream of the crop for recruits. Most companies do not.
Let's take a segue to basketball for a minute. In highschool basketball if somebody is tall and athletic then they're pretty much going to be a god at basketball. But when you get to the NBA being tall and athletic is a baseline prerequisite. Because of that suddenly all of those other skills that their height/athleticism were able to overcome in high school suddenly become almost entirely what determines their performance in the NBA.
It's the same thing here. Imagine we were able to perfectly quantity a developer's competence. Google's range is going to be incredibly high - let's say 95-100. Whereas the average company is going to be hiring developers in the 15-80 range. Google doesn't have much room for differentiation in skills since everybody is, as a prerequisite of getting where they are - several sigmas outside the norm in terms of skill. So other skills that would normally be less relevant are suddenly major factors in overall performance differentiation.
So yes, give me the 1000 most athletic individuals in the world. And we'll set them to learning how to box. And in the end there will be skill sets that determine who becomes the best boxer among them. And that skill will not be athleticism, since it's hardly going to be able to be expressed in this sort of field. But that does not mean that athleticism is not the most relevant skill to becoming a good boxer. In fact it almost certainly is, by orders of magnitude. But when you start with a group where it is taken as a granted, its effect is artificially diminished.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday September 25 2017, @08:39AM
Very nice illustration of the concept of "conditional probability".
Thank you.
(Score: 2) by TheRaven on Monday September 25 2017, @09:09AM
As someone who works with teams at ARM, Apple, Google, and Microsoft on a fairly regular basis, I've not seen much evidence that Google people are better than anyone else, though they are far more likely to reinvent the wheel. Of these companies, ARM is the only one that doesn't seem to employ any idiots (though they're also smaller, so can be more selective, and probably have quite a lot of self-selection in their candidate pool).
sudo mod me up