Walkaway

by Cory Doctorow

“But Amanda can’t do it all. Unless she’s working on a one-woman problem, she’ll have to cooperate with others. If she sucks at that, it might take a hundred times more work in total to get it done than if Gretyl – who’s good at sharing her toys and keeping everyone purring – were the boss. This isn’t anecdote – as you keep telling me, the plural of anecdote is not fact. Limpopo sent around this meta-analysis from the Walkaway Journal of Organizational Studies that compared the productivity of programmers. It broke out the work programmers did as individuals and inside groups. It found that even though there were programmers who could produce code that was a hundred times better than the median – one percent as many bugs, one hundred times more memory efficiency – that this kind of insane virtuosity was only weakly correlated with achievement in groups.”