"Collaboration" Is Bullshit
5 hours ago
- #accountability
- #productivity
- #collaboration
- Only 15-20% of riflemen in active combat fired their weapons, as found by S.L.A. Marshall in WWII.
- The 80/20 rule appears in various contexts, like IBM's discovery that 20% of features accounted for 80% of computer usage.
- Modern tech industry promotes 'collaboration' as a solution to human coordination, leading to an overload of tools like Notion, Slack, and Jira.
- Collaboration often results in activity without meaningful output, confusing transparency with progress and visibility with accountability.
- Diffusion of responsibility in groups reduces individual effort, as shown by Ringelmann's rope-pulling experiment and Brooks' Law in software development.
- High-quality work is often done by individuals or small teams with clear authority, not large collaborative groups.
- Collaboration-as-ideology makes unilateral decisions seem antisocial, discouraging ownership and accountability.
- Excessive coordination (standups, retros, meetings) often outweighs actual execution time, with little impact on productivity.
- True responsibility must lie with one person, but modern collaborative systems obscure accountability.
- A return to individual ownership and trust could simplify work and clarify who is truly contributing.