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Everyone who is part of an organization — a company, a nonprofit, a condo board — has experienced the pathologies that can occur when human beings try to work together in groups. Now the NYT reports on recent research on why some groups, like some people, are reliably smarter than others. In one study, researchers grouped 697 volunteer participants into teams of two to five members. Each team worked together to complete a series of short tasks, which were selected to represent the varied kinds of problems that groups are called upon to solve in the real world. One task involved logical analysis, another brainstorming; others emphasized coordination, planning and moral reasoning. Teams with higher average I.Q.s didn’t score much higher on collective intelligence tasks than did teams with lower average I.Q.s. Nor did teams with more extroverted people, or teams whose members reported feeling more motivated to contribute to their group’s success.
Instead, the smartest teams were distinguished by three characteristics (PDF). First, their members contributed more equally to the team’s discussions, rather than letting one or two people dominate the group. Second, their members scored higher on a test called Reading the Mind in the Eyes, which measures how well people can read complex emotional states from images of faces with only the eyes visible. Finally, teams with more women outperformed teams with more men. It appeared that it was not “diversity” (having equal numbers of men and women) that mattered for a team’s intelligence, but simply having more women. This last effect, however, was partly explained by the fact that women, on average, were better at “mindreading” than men.
Interestingly enough, a second study has now replicated these findings for teams that worked together online communicating purely by typing messages into a browser . "Emotion-reading mattered just as much for the online teams whose members could not see one another as for the teams that worked face to face. What makes teams smart must be not just the ability to read facial expressions, but a more general ability, known as “Theory of Mind,” to consider and keep track of what other people feel, know and believe."
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Snotnose on Monday January 19 2015, @05:00AM
I'm 56, and have worked on dozens of teams. Granted, a bad apple can bring everyone down. But IMHO management is the failure. First, if there is a bad apple management needs to remove it, which they seldom do. Second, if management is the bad apple they won't remove themselves. Worst case is when you have a bad apple manager with a bad apple teacher's pet on the team who tells management what management wants to hear, and gets listened to.
Case study #1: Add voice mail to an existing product using a language (Python) nobody has used, and existing code that is a mess but can't be cleaned up because nobody documented each customer's requirements, so nobody knows what can be cut. Management wanted it in 2 months. Junior programmer said hay no problem. I brought up unit tests in a meeting and was expressly forbidden from doing them. I refused to say it could be done in 2 months, it was doable in 3 and pretty sure in 4. I did unit tests, Jr programmer was made lead (over 4 of us with more experience), Jr programmer's code routinely broke my unit tests. I got fired for writing unit tests. 6 months later the project wasn't done, both the manager and Jr programmer had been fired, the project wasn't working a year later.
Bonus: I was the DSP/Linux guru, so I was given the PC that had the DSP code the company's livelihood depended on. Did I mention this company didn't do any sort of revision control, even though I pushed hard for it? Anywhoo, about 3 months after being fired I got a call from a friend who still worked there, wondering if I knew where that PC went. Sure, under my desk on the left hand side. Oops. Seems after I got fired IT took all the computers in my cube and reformatted the hard drives, then distributed them to new hires. Company paid $100k for this software about 5 years before I was hired, and it was gone.
Case study #2: Startup wireless to compete with 802.11g. Good team. Clueless lead. Lead decided to hold daily 15 minute meetings at 9 AM to see where everyone was. I said it was a bad idea. 15 minute meeting drug out to an hour. Nothing useful was exchanged, lead could not remember from day to day who was working on what and where they were. Ended up 9-10 AM every day was spent in a useless meeting, then after the meeting we adjourned to the office I shared with my office-mate, where we all, minus the lead, bitched about the lead. Then we took a lunch, which ended up being closer to 2 hours than 30 minutes.
Bonus: Emergency meeting on a Saturday, found out the VP was telling the lead stuff to be disseminated to the group, but we never got any of it, and our concerns were supposed to be sent up to him via the lead, he never heard any of them. About 2 months later the entire group, minus 2 (about 8 of us), got laid off because our code was done and they didn't know what to do with us. The two they kept? 1 brown-noser who couldn't code his way out of a paper bag, and 1 of the sharpest dudes I've ever worked with. The lead and VP were shocked to find themselves out of a job, the rest of us knew the signs and were expecting it.
/ wow, feels kinda good to vent 15 years after the fact :)
When the dust settled America realized it was saved by a porn star.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Snotnose on Monday January 19 2015, @05:16AM
Heh, just remembered Case Study #3. It's 1991 or so, I'm working for a company that makes font cartridges for HP printers (Pacific Data Products, "pacific data products font cartridges" makes google happy). Company made their living knowing exactly how the font cartridge interface for HP printers works and designing products to fit into that slot. Our task? Make a network printer, with an ethernet interface on one end, and a font cartridge interface on the other end. Idea being you plugged this thing into your font cartridge, plugged your brand spankin new twisted pair into the other end, and you had a network printer.
We're brainstorming on how to do this, and we're also kinda worried HP comes out with a new series every year or so, and each time it takes us a few months to reverse engineer the card slot. One of us gets the bright idea of having ethernet on one side, and instead of a card slot we have regular IEE 1284 (ie: printer port) on the other end. IEE 1284 was a standard, the printer had to support it. The card slot was proprietary, HP could, and did, change it every year. We figured the hardware and software efforts would be the same and, as a benefit, we could support every fricken printer out there, not just HP.
Our VP shot us down. The company was known for using the cartridge slot (which HP intended to be used only for fonts), and if we didn't use that we were not using the company's secret sauce.
John and I left like rats from a sinking ship, and a year or two later the company shut it's doors.
When the dust settled America realized it was saved by a porn star.
(Score: 2) by pogostix on Monday January 19 2015, @07:19AM
Great stories. After looking up font cartridges I'm surprised we didn't just go back to typewriters. Ugly ugly stuff :)
(Score: 2) by FatPhil on Monday January 19 2015, @12:46PM
Some of the horror stories had upsides. I remember when my boss (who did no work, ever) and my boss's boss (who also did no work, ever) told me in my yearly appraisal that my yearly productivity of -5 KLOC was alright, they knew I was doing a good job stripping out the shit put in the codebase by the last half dozen crappy student placements, and they'd try and work out how to explain it to upper levels of management how my whole team (which was by then only 1 developer) seemed to be doing less than nothing.
void set_Nth_bit(Uint32 &i, Uint32 b)
{
Uint32 v=1, l;
for (l=1; l<b; ++l)
v <<= 1;
i|=v;
}
After seeing that, whenever I mentioned encountering bad code to my g/f, she used to enquire if it was just "bad" code or actual "Thierry" code.
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 19 2015, @04:46PM
That code clearly could be improved:
SCNR ;-)
On a more serious note: Was the "l=1" instead of "l=0" intentional?
(Score: 3, Insightful) by tibman on Monday January 19 2015, @05:33AM
Fired for making unit tests, yikes! That manager had no business being in charge of any dev team.
SN won't survive on lurkers alone. Write comments.
(Score: 2) by Kell on Monday January 19 2015, @06:59AM
A lot of bad managers work that way: forbid you from doing the obvious sensible necessary thing, and then fire you for doing them anyway. Apparently being a conscientious employee is treason?
I once worked on an autonomous vehicle project where the lead academic "firewalled" me (postdoc) from the student (PhD) also working on it - I was forbidden to talk to him about the project we were supposed to be doing together. Why? Because we were "working together too closely". Isn't that what you do in a group project? We ended up meeting over lunch each day off campus just to keep each other appraised of each other's progress. It made things very slow. It was a terrible experience to see our cutting edge work 3 years ahead of everyone else get squandered and overtaken because of incompetent management. I eventually left to a faculty position of my own, but the student ended up being given insane projects (that he succeeded at) until the academic just outright fired him.
Scientists ask questions. Engineers solve problems.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 19 2015, @09:32AM
You know, what I have just read from multiple people in this forum sounds so ludicrous I would have never believed such things could possibly happen in a profit-centered business environment.
But I have to believe it. Similar stuff happened to me too in a company I worked at when a large investment company bought us.
I could not believe the misdirection of our resources happening under the direction of some high-up, highly paid, but had no idea how our stuff worked. My computer was deemed "dated" and sent to scrap, even though I had become quite proficient with it. Would they take an old violinist's instrument and trash it because they could buy a later cheaper one somewhere else? Seemed like a necktie was a tourniquet for the head on these folks, because their brain seemed offline.
If I were writing code for sale, I could see that, but I am an engineer and what I had was software that did integer math emulations for me to see how my statistics algorithms would perform in microcontrollers, and I had some simple schematic and PCB layout software so I could do fast-turns of PCB with the board house down the street for quick prototypes. With executive leadership, tasks that used to take days now took months, and often I spent so much time trying to re-learn some other way of doing things that the manager would approve that nothing got done at all.
The most critical people we had were the old guys that were the first to go. From what I could tell, they were not very good ass-kissers to those they did not respect, and barging in dressed in power suit and tie did little to impress them. These old coots were the guys all us younger ones went to when things went sour - they had probably seen something similar and would tell us their take on it, which often made the difference between a few days work and something we could ponder months and lots of failed trys on and still not get it. A lot of those guys were past retirement age anyway, but they hung on for the fun of it - and working with the suit-guys must have been just as much as a pain in the ass to them as it was to me.
Now I am back working with a very small company. The pay is lousy, but the work is fun. So it means I am getting quite good at dumpster diving.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 19 2015, @12:32PM
"You know, what I have just read from multiple people in this forum sounds so ludicrous I would have never believed such things could possibly happen in a profit-centered business environment.
But I have to believe it. Similar stuff happened to me too in a company I worked at when a large investment company bought us. "
I got a crazier story. I know a security guard that used to be a field manager for a relatively new firm at the time. Very bright person. He worked there for a number of years and was asking to become an account manager. The owner told him he would hire him as an account manager when a position is available. As the company grew and expanded and succeeded the owner decided it was time to start hiring new account managers. But the owner didn't consider him for the position (I guess he wanted to keep him as a field manager). Instead the owner hired a bunch of x-military people with no security or field manager or any sort of relevant experience that were credentialed and applied to become cops and were turned down by various police departments for whatever reason. Basically a bunch of deadbeat wannabe cops that no one would hire. This field manager was very upset and quit. A year later this company declared bankruptcy because it was inundated with sexual harassment suits from the account managers harassing their security guards.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by VLM on Monday January 19 2015, @01:08PM
A lot of bad managers work that way: forbid you from doing the obvious sensible necessary thing, and then fire you for doing them anyway.
I don't think you guys understand how this works. Lets say you want to fire a guy for parking in your parking space, being black, a woman, a Jew, or even "worse" all of the above at the same time. Post 1960 or so, you don't write on the termination papers for HR under reason for firing "known to go to Synagogue on Saturdays". You make the job legally, carefully, totally impossible, then fire them for lack of productivity if they don't do the impossible or fire them for insubordination if they provide any feedback about the dumb idea other than the purest of brown nosing. As a bonus that might deny them unemployment benefits or might make them leave out of hatred.
Its not even necessarily illegal discrimination or arbitrary non-professional personal reasons. Maybe he just doesn't like your coding style or you wrote a bug that he really didn't like, but he got overruled by his boss or HR when he tried to fire you for his idea of a valid cause, so its time to go all underhanded to dispose of you. Also see stealth downsizing. If you need to downsize without starting a stampede to the door, just turn the workplace into a dilbertian hellhole and neglect to replacement hire as people leave, maybe ease back on the BS once salary drops below the new lower budget, etc.
The funny part is some of these management guys are total dinosaurs and don't understand that in 2015 people talk online, so banning version control or emacs or unit testing or whatever is going to have a spectacular negative public impact, which can kill a company. That's how you did stuff in the 90s, so managers stuck in '95 but working in '15 tend to make really stupid managerial decisions.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 19 2015, @03:09PM
That's how you did stuff in the 90s,
Even in 95 we used version control. Anyone who didnt quickly found out why it was a bad idea not to even have some sort of system/process or the real deal.
Do not mistake poor decisions for 'that is the way they did it'. They were poor decisions then and they still are.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Thexalon on Monday January 19 2015, @03:44PM
That certainly can be one part of the story. If management is trying to get rid of their subordinates, and giving you an impossible task is certainly a warning sign, then yes, you're completely right.
But there's another common management pathology, especially at startups, that goes like this: Companies like Apple (and it's nearly always Apple in their brains, because these guys always think they're the next Steve Jobs) succeeded because they did things completely different from the established wisdom in the field. Ergo, when my subordinates (who must not know better than me, otherwise they'd be the boss) present the established wisdom, I need to "lead" by defying that wisdom and demand they do something completely different.
This of course ignores how most successful companies get there: Do what others are trying to do, but be better at it.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 0, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 19 2015, @09:54AM
The reasonable thing would have been to not do unit tests, but look for another job.
Bad choice in that situation. You should have used the time you used to write those test in a more productive manner, that is, find a new job ASAP.
As opposed to quitting job for not being allowed to write unit test. Which would have looked much better on your resume, for sure.
So, did the company also forbid you to do backups? If not, then you also have to take part of the blame on that one for not making them. Unless you made them, but the company destroyed all the backups, too. Of course, if the company also forbade to make backups, they alone were to blame for that one.
Note that revision control isn't a replacement for backups (just as backups are no replacement for revision control). So while not doing revision control was certainly a bad decision, it is completely unrelated to the loss (after all, the revision control could have been on the very same computer). The loss is completely due to the failure of doing proper backups.