[HN Gopher] Engineering Teams Are Just Networks
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Engineering Teams Are Just Networks
Author : mbellotti
Score : 59 points
Date : 2021-09-30 17:40 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (bellmar.medium.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (bellmar.medium.com)
| cee_el123 wrote:
| off topic - will the cliched human tendency of saying "X is just
| Y" ever end ?
| roflc0ptic wrote:
| It's just human nature
| mcavoybn wrote:
| Probably not, I think there is utility in relating two similar
| things, especially when someone is likely to be more familiar
| with one over the other. Someone who knows networks really well
| could find it useful to model an engineering team as a network.
| What really matters is whether modeling the engineering team as
| a network is useful in your case or not.
| asplake wrote:
| Not offtopic but fair comment. The cliche is a clue that what
| follows is likely to be 1-dimensional and reductionist.
| Possibly lazy too, but I'm not sure that would be fair here -
| it wasn't such a low-effort article to warrant that.
| evilantnie wrote:
| This article inadvertently touches on complexity theory, which is
| something I've recently become interested in from a management
| perspective. In complexity theory, organizations are viewed as
| complex adaptive systems
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Complex_adaptive_system which are
| dynamic networks of interactions, much like this article is
| describing.
|
| It's been an interesting thought exercise to ignore typical
| management styles focusing on command and control structures, and
| shifting to holistic view of the organization and the networks
| that support its function. i.e. if you want to understand success
| of your top performers, you have to consider the system they
| operate within and how it enables their success. I think that
| relates to the point of this article, and I really enjoyed
| connecting the dots.
| corpMaverick wrote:
| We did a project in college as part of a Management class. We
| interviewed employees in a local enterprise and built a Graph
| describing the relationships between Employees(Nodes). We asked
| questions like Who do you like the most/the least, etc. It was
| very interesting and insightful, but I can't remember what the
| methodology was called and I haven't seen in it again in many
| years.
| zwieback wrote:
| More true in SW engineering than other fields. If you have lots
| of legacy infrastructure and you have a few engineers that really
| understand that technology then those nodes in the network can
| overrule almost anything. Hiring is made difficult because there
| may not that many people with the necessary background so now
| your hands are tied.
| whymauri wrote:
| Pretty much every team is a network... which is to say, I think
| this advice applies to hiring, generally. Not just engineers.
|
| Some people have made the solid point that a corollary to:
|
| > After a baseline level of competency is satisfied, who you hire
| does not matter.
|
| Is that the hiring team has a solid understanding of what that
| baseline level of competency is, in the first place. In my
| previous job, this was the limiting factor: the head of our
| hiring had absolutely no idea where that bar was.
| User23 wrote:
| And those networks imprint their structure in what they build[1].
|
| [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conway%27s_law
| jtth wrote:
| In an "X is just Y" comparison, a good heuristic to determine
| whether someone is being a human being is to ask whether the
| comparison reduces the humanity out of the concept. This kind of
| thing is sociopathic.
| [deleted]
| bjornsing wrote:
| These articles always skip over the all important context: What
| is the engineering team supposed to accomplish?
|
| > After a baseline level of competency is satisfied, who you hire
| does not matter.
|
| For your average CRUD web app this is obviously true. For the
| Manhattan Project it's obviously false. Most engineering work
| falls somewhere in-between.
| dragontamer wrote:
| Funny you bring up the Manhattan project, as the actual uranium
| was purified by the "Calutron Girls".
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calutron_Girls
|
| These were high school graduates (largely female), who sat
| around fiddling with the controls to manually run the uranium
| purification knobs.
|
| Apparently, engineers and scientists were really bad at this
| job. I don't know how they figured it out, but high school
| females had just the right mindset to watch the control panel
| and move the dials correctly.
|
| None of the Calutron Girls knew they were making the bomb. In
| fact, the article where I read about them was an interview with
| an old-lady in the 2000s, who was surprised to learn that her
| high-school summer job was building the A-Bomb!! I think they
| were told that it was very important for the war effort that
| they do their job correctly, but that was about it.
|
| ------------
|
| So even for an incredibly complicated job like the Manhattan
| project (which obviously needed top-tier scientists), it turns
| out that top-tier scientists / engineers simply don't have the
| mindset to do some dreary day-to-day tasks. Other people (such
| as the Calutron Girls) may end up having a better mindset to do
| these parts of the job.
|
| I wouldn't be surprised if our understanding of human
| psychology, sociology, and group-dynamics are still poor today.
| The ideal team composition is still a big mystery, especially
| on big hypothetical jobs like a "Manhattan Project".
| Joker_vD wrote:
| Yep, before we had mechanical and electronic computers, there
| were human computers, and they apparently too were mostly
| women: [0] . I think (but it's just a speculation of mine)
| that it's not because women inherently have a "better mindset
| to do some dreary day-to-day tasks" but that it's an acquired
| trait: I blame it on heavy training in cleaning and sewing.
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_(occupation)
| dragontamer wrote:
| That very well could be it.
|
| I probably should be more specific: the enrichment facility
| had roughly 20,000 employees. That's more than enough time
| for managers to figure out who was good and/or bad at the
| job, as well as to build stereotypes / culture for how to
| pick out a good candidate for hiring.
|
| It very well could be that these women had tedious hobbies
| (such as sewing, crochets, or other textile work), which
| made them predisposed to passing whatever tests the
| enrichment facility had.
|
| In either case, the end result is the room full of tens of
| thousands of young women.
|
| ---------
|
| Another link on the Calutron Girls:
| https://www.energy.gov/articles/five-fast-facts-about-
| calutr...
| geofft wrote:
| Is that true of the Manhattan Project? The fundamental science
| that the bomb was potentially possible had already been worked
| out (which was why they launched it in the first place). Most
| of the work there was physically building the bomb, acquiring
| and working with the raw materials, performing tests, etc.;
| most of the complex work was still working from what scientists
| had already written.
|
| Consider that it took Newton and Leibniz to _invent_ calculus,
| but, once invented, we expect high school /college students to
| be able to learn it.
|
| I think for _almost_ all roles in the Manhattan Project
| (possibly everyone except Oppenheimer himself, and there were
| plenty of other candidates for even that role) you could hire
| and train anyone with a baseline level of competency in the
| work needed. It wasn 't the sort of work that required genius,
| but at the same time, it was novel; nobody came into the
| project deeply experienced in refining uranium or whatever. So
| as long as you structured the project in a way that people
| could get up to speed quickly you were fine.
| nonameiguess wrote:
| Given how few countries have managed to launch a successful
| nuclear program, in spite of the basic theory of how fission
| and chain reactions work being published a century ago, there
| must be _something_ beyond basic follow instructions ability
| required. Though whether that is anything intellectual versus
| access to raw material and enough time to enrich it and build
| facilities before the US or Israel notices and blows you up
| isn 't clear.
| hyperman1 wrote:
| As far as I understand the author, it's always obviously true.
| She just ups the baseline to genius level if you're on the
| Manhattan project.
|
| Which makes the statement mostly tautological: Hire only people
| capable of doing the work.
|
| Maybe she doesn't want you to hire overqualified people, and
| wants you to shift focus on what qualities the team as a whole
| is missing.
|
| All of this never makes it out of hiring 101 teritory, of
| course.
|
| Update: s/he/she/
| marcosdumay wrote:
| So, it's obvious that if there were some people much smarter
| than the ones working on the Manhattan project, they wouldn't
| be able to improve it on any reasonable way?
|
| I could maybe agree that it's true, but I really don't agree
| that it is obvious, and don't agree that it generalizes to
| all less demanding projects done by less capable people. It
| probably is true for a lot of things, but claiming it applies
| to _all_ seems ridiculous.
| titanomachy wrote:
| "She", I think.
| qsort wrote:
| I mean, is it true even then?
|
| I know it doesn't work like that, but as a first
| approximation we can imagine that people working on the
| Manhattan project would be able to write some javascript or
| whatever given the chance, while the opposite isn't true. So
| you would still want to hire the best people you can get your
| hands on: maybe you underestimated the difficulty of the
| current project, or the next one will be harder. Anything
| else is just Pareto-inefficient.
| groby_b wrote:
| "You can get your hands on" is the imperative part.
|
| All the article is trying to say (as far as I can tell) is
| "do not wait for the perfect hire if you have a perfectly
| good hire".
|
| The "complex contagion" and "network effects" are what
| triggered the insight for them, but are not really
| necessary to understanding the principle.
| BenoitP wrote:
| I always wondered if a pagerankend management structure would
| fare better for performance and leadership recognition against
| the classical hierarchic one.
|
| Anyone here has data on this?
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