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Re: Catalyst team change

by dragonchild (Archbishop)
on May 04, 2006 at 15:43 UTC ( [id://547445]=note: print w/replies, xml ) Need Help??


in reply to Catalyst team change

There is no "I" in "TEAM".

My criteria for good software:
  1. Does it work?
  2. Can someone else come in, make a change, and be reasonably certain no bugs were introduced?

Replies are listed 'Best First'.
Re^2: Catalyst team change
by japhy (Canon) on May 04, 2006 at 16:25 UTC
    So let's take all the people out of the team and see what's left.

    The issue is not whether some person in the team thinks he's bigger than the whole. The problem is that when you stop acknowledging the individual members of the team as just that -- individuals, their own persons -- you run the risk of alienating people. See 1 Cor. 12:14-26 for some biblical reinforcement of the dualism (or is it duality?) of a team.


    Jeff japhy Pinyan, P.L., P.M., P.O.D, X.S.: Perl, regex, and perl hacker
    How can we ever be the sold short or the cheated, we who for every service have long ago been overpaid? ~~ Meister Eckhart
      Yes, that is true. (Nice reference, btw. 1st Corinthians is one of the better Epistles, in my opinion.) But, I think acknowledgement that it cuts both ways is necessary. When you are part of a team, you have to be willing to work within the team in order to make the team work. Otherwise, it's nothing but a disparate group of individuals each going their own way. While that works for massive groups, it doesn't work for tightly focused groups that need to produce a cohesive product. Diplomacy, the art of getting along, is all about compromise.

      I'm not saying that everyone should submit to the Collective. I'm saying that you can't have rabid individualism and still expect to produce a good product.


      My criteria for good software:
      1. Does it work?
      2. Can someone else come in, make a change, and be reasonably certain no bugs were introduced?
Re^2: Catalyst team change
by gellyfish (Monsignor) on May 04, 2006 at 15:51 UTC

    But there is a "ME" ;-)

    /J\

Re^2: Catalyst team change
by BrowserUk (Patriarch) on May 04, 2006 at 15:53 UTC

    ...and there is no team without it's individuals.


    Examine what is said, not who speaks -- Silence betokens consent -- Love the truth but pardon error.
    Lingua non convalesco, consenesco et abolesco. -- Rule 1 has a caveat! -- Who broke the cabal?
    "Science is about questioning the status quo. Questioning authority".
    In the absence of evidence, opinion is indistinguishable from prejudice.
      But the team is an entity in addition to its individuals. If the members of a team consider themselves, the individuals, as more important than the team, then the team dies. That was my point and that's what happened here.

      My criteria for good software:
      1. Does it work?
      2. Can someone else come in, make a change, and be reasonably certain no bugs were introduced?

        I know none of the details of the Catalyst project--I'm not even sure I know what it is exactly--and none of the details of the problems.

        I do know that every team needs a leader. Every idea a progenitor. If you don't like the idea, you don't join the team. If you disagree with the leader and their ideas, you don't gang up to remove the leader, you go off and follow your own notions.

        I'm an inveterate non-joiner for exactly those reasons. I'd rather influence (or not), through reason from the outside, than inveigle my way onto a project and then stage a coup--bloodless or otherwise.

        I'm also an inveterate private projecteer, because I prefer to follow my own ideas to fruition or failure. It takes longer and may never complete, but it's a lot less frustrating than having to justify your decisions to other, johnny-come-latelys.

        Very few technical debates have clear cut black & white answers. They nearly always involve trade-offs and priorities and value-judgements about those. In a volunteer project, IMO, the progenitor gets the casting vote--even against the numerical weight of opinion. Those who cannot live with the progenitors decision have the option of forking the project or starting their own.

        In the commercial environment, you do what the man-who-pays, tells you to do.

        In a volunteer project, you do it for your own reasons, your own motives and your own passions. Once a project ceases to be something you look forward to doing, and becomes something you start avoiding, you best drop it and move on. The quickest way for a passion to become a burden, is for you to loose heart in it's direction. And the quickest way for that to happen when you are the progenitor of a project, is when you loose control of the direction and goals of your ideas and efforts.

        Does any of this relate to the Catalyst project? I have no idea.


        Examine what is said, not who speaks -- Silence betokens consent -- Love the truth but pardon error.
        Lingua non convalesco, consenesco et abolesco. -- Rule 1 has a caveat! -- Who broke the cabal?
        "Science is about questioning the status quo. Questioning authority".
        In the absence of evidence, opinion is indistinguishable from prejudice.
        But the team is an entity in addition to its individuals.
        What addition? Are you trying to say "the whole is greater than the sum of it's parts"?

        That statement only means you don't understand the parts well enough.

        There is only the parts. There is no 'addition'. The team consists of it's individuals. Period. I don't hold with this pseudo spiritualist malarky.

      But that's looking at it from the other direction. In which case you'd have "MEAT". Which should be heated, much like the discussion.

      And you just know that's going to torque the vegans to no end.

      Or something . . . . At least this makes less sense than I just did. I hope.

      Update: Actually you'd have "MAET". Marginal sysdlexia FTW.

        TEAM MEANS REDRUM!

        Meh. MAET and MEAT are homonymous. Same difference.

        print substr("Just another Perl hacker", 0, -2);
        - apotheon
        CopyWrite Chad Perrin

Re^2: Catalyst team change
by radiantmatrix (Parson) on May 08, 2006 at 21:01 UTC

    True, but there is a "U" in "SUCK". (Nothing personal. Stock response only. May contain trace amounts of fat.)

    There are individuals within a team, and any team that forgets to consider the value of the individuals -- as the "no I in TEAM" epithet seems to suggest -- is a team doomed to homogeneity and all the failings that implies.

    <-radiant.matrix->
    A collection of thoughts and links from the minds of geeks
    The Code that can be seen is not the true Code
    I haven't found a problem yet that can't be solved by a well-placed trebuchet

      Taking that to its logical conclusion, I'm prompted to make reference to groupthink. It was defined by a psychologist named Irving Janis as "a mode of thinking that people engage in when they are deeply involved in a cohesive in-group, when the members' strivings for unanimity override their motivation to realistically appraise alternative courses of action." I tend to have negative reactions to teamwork-conformity platitudes like "there's no i in team" precisely because of my experiences with groupthink in the past.

      In point of fact, I think the phenomenon of groupthink is a fair bit of the mechanism behind not only bureaucratic inefficiency, high school drama, and office politics, but also -- in a more abstracted sense -- the successes of market domination strategies of large corporations and even political elections. It's not only important to recognize the contributions of the individual, but also (and perhaps more importantly) to avoid letting the individual be subsumed by the collective. Otherwise, you run the risk of becoming the next SCO, with no greater aggregate talent for innovation than your ability to dream up new lawsuit revenue scams.

      print substr("Just another Perl hacker", 0, -2);
      - apotheon
      CopyWrite Chad Perrin

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