Comment by mapontosevenths
2 days ago
I very much agree with this author, and the sort of open source ethos it embodies.
However, as a corporate stooge I have a hard time balancing my natural desire to work with the garage door up and my "neighbors" (legitimate) need for me to turn my terrible garage band music down and only show up after practice is over (when I have a nice deliverable).
Does anyone have any tips for finding the right balance? What is the professional development teams version of working with the garage door open?
So long as this is about sharing on the Internet, the fun part is that no one is forced to be your neighbour. The question becomes whether you want to create the opportunity for kindred spirits to find you or not.
In a corporate setting it's a bit different, since you need to create non-critical sharing spaces where it's okay to share that sort of progress.
I was also a corporate stooge (at both Apple and Microsoft). One of the biggest differences in culture was exactly this point. At Apple, it was encouraged to share your successes and failures in real time across teams. At Microsoft, there was so much infighting and competition that you tended to share nothing until you were ready to release. For example, someone on the Windows team wouldn't want to give away a cool solution that could be "stolen" by the dev tools team. This resulted in walled gardens that were protected at all costs.
Remember that webcomic of the org charts of different companies? Microsoft's was a bunch of separate groups with guns aimed at each other.
Here it is: https://ritholtz.com/2013/07/organizational-charts-of-amazon...
Seems related to the explore/exploit problem, where the standard answer is related to the answer to the Secretary Problem[0], with the important caveat that it depends on whether "passing" on an opportunity legitimately makes it unavailable in future.
But another good answer is to open the door and trust the audience. The people who show up to the garage practice are perhaps not people who show up to buy tickets.
Adopting a scarcity mindset, generally, is a bad idea.
[0]:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secretary_problem
I'd never heard of the secretary problem, though like all of us I've been in that situation hundreds of times. Fascinating read! Thank you.
This is one of those (increasingly rare) internet conversations that might lead to legitimately better outcomes in my life.
how do you know that you are not the super critical one?