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Strong opinions, weakly held

Month: August 2013

The case against bombing Syria

Myth-Busting the Looming War With Syria

The basic case against bombing Syria. Read James Fallows as well.

Marc Hedlund on what managers produce

What do you make as a manager?

Marc Hedlund on the less immediately tangible but in many ways more rewarding products of being a manager. The difference between good jobs and bad jobs is the manager you report to, a lot of the time. Most people spend more time at work on any other single thing. As a manager, your responsibility is to make that time more fulfilling, enjoyable, and productive. I find it’s a good gig.

One of the rules of modern life is that you can’t choose your billionaires; they choose you.

Paul Ford explains why Jeff Bezos would purchase the Washington Post

UK government detains Glenn Greenwald’s partner

Glenn Greenwald’s partner was returning to Brazil by way of London when he was detained under a terrorism law. He was then questioned not about terrorist plots but about Greenwald’s reporting work and the electronic media he was carrying. In their attempts to squelch reporting about how terrorism laws are abused, the UK is demonstrating the typical form that abuse takes.

For those who grew up with the internet, the people they know online and the people they know offline are often one and the same. We interact all day on Facebook with friends we first met face-to-face, and we meet our Twitter followers for drinks. The internet is real life, and that’s all there is to it.

Summer Anne Burton explains to the dim why cheating online is just cheating.

Monoculture and consensus

In response to my previous post on engineering culture, Bill Higgins asked in the comments:

Recently I worked on a project with multiple sites, and one of our toughest problems was the vast cultural differences between the sites. As a trivial example, one of the sites was militant about test automation and another site barely paid lip service to it.

So it seems like there is some happy medium between “multiple, incompatible cultures” and “monoculture”. I would be interested to hear your thoughts on where cultural homogeneity is helpful and where it is harmful.

It seems to me that the problem here is not diversity but rather failure to reach consensus. One big challenge when it comes to building engineering teams is figuring out which things everyone has to agree on and which things everyone can do their own way. For example, if you’re a Python shop, everyone can use the text editor of their choosing, but everyone has to use spaces or tabs, mixing the two is not an option.

Similarly, test driven development only works if everyone on the team practices it. If you’re not writing tests, it’s really easy to write code that is nearly impossible to test. Similarly, if there’s no continuous integration infrastructure, the people who aren’t writing tests will regularly check in code that breaks the existing tests. Teams have to reach some kind of consensus about these issues with team-wide implications.

To me this is a separate issue from avoiding monoculture. Teams have to reach consensus in order to function well. I read someone who said that in interviews, they look for people who are willing to “disagree and commit” when they can’t reach consensus. Oddly, I find that these situations arise as often on teams with no demographic diversity (read, composed entirely of white guys) as they do on more diverse teams.

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