Walkaway

by Cory Doctorow

“I just read the summary and skimmed the stats and the methodology for smooshing together the different data-sets. The tldr is these hacker-wizards who produce better code than anyone were often so hard to work with that they made everyone else’s work worse, buggier and slower. The amount of time they had to spend fixing that code slowed them down so much, it ate up their virtuosity gains. “Attempts to put together ‘Manhattan Project’ teams made from wizards without normal dumb-asses like me showed exactly the same effect. “They footnoted one study, one I did read – an ethnographic survey of projects that went to shit, even though they had brilliant programmers. The authors found there were two major causes of failure. The first was some wizards were colossal assholes. ‘Asshole’ was what they called it, because the phrase came up from three different teams. It’s impossible to work with assholes, even brilliant assholes. ‘Don’t work with assholes’ is great advice, but it’s also a duh moment, because if you haven’t figured that out by your second or third team, you might be the asshole. “The other category was when you had wizards who had no clue how to work with others. They weren’t dicks, they just didn’t have the instinct. The authors found teams where the wizard and everyone else hadn’t failed, and in these cases, it was because there was someone good with people who figured out how to smooth over differences and see how people fit together. These people were wizards of ...