

Handling (unintentional) damage to culture - undrcvr-lagggal
https://gist.githubusercontent.com/uclagal/489bdbd61c17976bb666/raw/6050e8955f527ed739fbb107a1f7aa27e81bc8b4/gistfile1.txt

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informatimago
So basically, you've got a 10x programmer. Lucky you!

Try not to kill the goose that lays golden eggs.

First, you could talk to this programmer asking whether he/she would wish to
integrate more closely with the other programmers' culture (perhaps he/she
would like to but there's something preventing it, like shyness or other). But
my bet is that he/she doesn't particularly care about it, and it could even be
detrimental to the golden eggs production. After all, a day has only 24 hours.

If that poses a problem with respect to the rest of the team, you may try to
isolate a 10x golden eggs laying team. Right, for now you only have one in
that team, but cross your fingers, you could be very lucky. This isolation
could be physical (have a separate branch for this other team (eg. when Steve
Jobs built his team to develop the Macintosh, they worked from a separate
building from the main Apple Campus)), but foremost it could be more virtual,
meaning the two teams can work on different projects (or if the same project,
on different modules).

Perhaps you can contract now several projects for several customers at the
same time, distributing independent projects to your teams?

~~~
undrcvr-lagggal
> First, you could talk to this programmer asking whether he/she would wish to
> integrate more closely with the other programmers' culture (perhaps he/she
> would like to but there's something preventing it, like shyness or other).

Wouldn't that seem a little forced, though? If shyness is the issue, I'm not
sure what one could say to address that.

Isolation seems like a good idea. However I'm worried the rest of team would
have their ego broken, or even that our startup like culture would shift to a
more corporate structure. Having one or small amount of people in charge of
one big thing would kill the bus factor; That would have to be accounted for
somehow.

------
methodology
Isn't it painful to alternate between typing "her/him", "him/her", "her/his",
"his/her", "she/he", "he/she"?

~~~
undrcvr-lagggal
I wrote a browser plugin in Go (using gopherjs) that will humanize words like
it, it's, and its when you press a hotkey while the cursor is on them. It will
randomly pick between his/her or her/his. I'd put it on github if you like,
but it would need a bit of cleaning up and work first.

