
Be careful of who you work with - chadfowler
http://chadfowler.com/2011/02/24/be-careful-of-who-you-work-with
======
edw519
I would have preferred the title, "Recognize who you're working with"

I have worked with many programmers and it's not always readily apparent who
is better than me and who is not. And of course, some are better than me in
some things but not others.

We don't always have the luxury of choosing who we work with, and have even
less chance of only picking those better than us. So it's probably more
practical to learn which habits to emulate and which to avoid in those we
actually do encounter.

For example, that database whiz may suck at algoritms, so just because you
learned one great thing from him, it does not necessarily follow that you
should learn others. Also, I have often found a big difference between the
perceptions of others (especially bosses and users) and my own assessment of
their skills.

There is something to be learned from everyone. Just get good at figuring out
"what" from "whom".

~~~
joe_the_user
Indeed,

Suppose every single person adopted the "I only want to play with a people
better than me" approach?

Well, then those people you want to play/program/etc with... they don't want
to play with you!

Ad-finitum till you get Grouch's "I'd never join a club that would allow a
person like me to become a member"...

(there's lots of "interesting" game-theory/mating-theory describing these
situations but I still don't find them appealing)

~~~
Bootvis
Skill isn't one dimensional. If I'm better at X and my colleague is better at
Y we can both learn from someone 'smarter' and everybody is clearly better of
by cooperating.

------
jasonkester
You see this phenomenon in Rock Climbing quite clearly. There are only maybe
30 guys in the world who have climbed routes graded French 9a+ or harder. Of
those, more than half are from a tiny region in Spain.

You might think that this is some weird genetic thing going on, but if you go
there to investigate you'll notice something strange: your climbing improves.
A lot.

Suddenly you're thrown into a world where climbing 8a (a lifetime goal for
most dedicated sport climbers) is something that pretty much everybody does,
often within only a year or two of starting out. Your concept of what is
"hard" changes, and suddenly it doesn't seem so outrageous to get on a route
that should be way over your head. It gets in your blood. You train harder.
You _climb harder_. Just because you're there.

It's not a fluke of grading, either. You can take that ability you gained back
to your home crag and demonstrate for yourself that it's real by polishing off
projects that you'd been working on for years. Then you can watch it fade away
over the course of maybe half a year as you slip back into climbing with your
old crowd.

------
codeslush
"always be the worst musician in every band you’re in" -- GOLD!

FYI, the continue reading link either shouldn't be on the page, or it should
take you to the rest of the article - not sure if I got everything or not.

~~~
gcheong
It sounds great but most places seem to hire based on current abilities or
previous accomplishments, not potential, so how does one go about implementing
this advice for anything other than an entry level position?

~~~
nostrademons
Work for companies that are weak in what you're strong in, but strong in lots
of other areas.

When I joined Google Search, I was frequently the smartest guy in the room
when it came to JavaScript quirks, or web development, or rich AJAX apps. I
was usually the dumbest when it came to massively distributed systems, or
information retrieval, or i18n and accessibility, or unstructured data mining.

Over time, I've transferred a bunch of my frontend knowledge to other
engineers, and I've learned a whole lot about how massive software systems are
architected. I'm a better developer, the people around me are better
developers, the company is several hundred million dollars richer, and
everybody wins.

~~~
neilk
Your experience sounds a lot like mine, except my team thought that expertise
in Javascript was a sign that you had wasted your life.

I'm not bitter. At all.

------
topherjaynes
Hey Chad, seems like a good post. . . not being one of those crazy typography
guys, but it was very hard to read this post. I'm in Chrome, xp, and on a 21
inch monitor. The letters look like they are weighted differently in
thickness. Maybe move to a more standard font? Anyways, just an fyi.

~~~
jcfiala
I'm glad to hear I'm not the only one having that problem - site is nigh-
unreadable with both firefox and chrome.

Also, there seems to be a continue reading link on the page that doesn't
actually do anything.

~~~
6ren
<https://www.readability.com/bookmarklets>

The version of the bookmarket I use [edited to code, because its length was
mucking up the whole page]

    
    
        javascript:(function(){readConvertLinksToFootnotes=false;readStyle='style-newspaper';readSize='size-medium';readMargin='margin-wide';_readability_script=document.createElement('script');_readability_script.type='text/javascript';_readability_script.src='http://lab.arc90.com/experiments/readability/js/readability.js?x=+(Math.random());document.documentElement.appendChild(_readability_script);_readability_css=document.createElement('link');_readability_css.rel='stylesheet';_readability_css.href='http://lab.arc90.com/experiments/readability/css/readability.css;_readability_css.type=text/css;_readability_css.media=all;document.documentElement.appendChild(_readability_css);_readability_print_css=document.createElement(link);_readability_print_css.rel=stylesheet;_readability_print_css.href=http://lab.arc90.com/experiments/readability/css/readability-print.css;_readability_print_css.media=print;_readability_print_css.type=text/css;document.getElementsByTagName(head)[0].appendChild(_readability_print_css);})();

------
jdp23
Excellent points on the spreading of behavior and emotions via social
networks.

In "The Hidden Power of Social Networks" (an excellent book on social network
behavior within large organizations), Rob Cross reports work looking at the
effect different people had on energy. Some people, when you meet with them,
everybody comes out energized ... others, you come away totally meh. Who's it
more productive to associate with? I don't know of similar studies with
startups, early customers, and partners, but I'd bet dollars to donuts there
would be similar patterns.

~~~
6ren
An extreme version is to work for energy, not money. Instead of choosing
clients, customers, markets, suppliers, angels based on profitability (or
future profitability), base it on energy.

There's a reasonable probability that energy will translate into value
creation and then into money, anyway. And even if not, would you rather be
full-of-life and poor, or half-dead and rich? (to dichotomize for dramatic
contrast.)

------
rdrimmie
I am pretty strongly affected by the environment that I'm in, so this post
really hits home for me, but there's a conflict I can't resolve about always
being the worst x in your collective noun:

Why would a collective that is better than you, which probably subscribes to
this moderately common notion, hire you?

I guess Harpo had the same problem.

~~~
JonnieCache
_> I guess Harpo had the same problem._

Actually it was Groucho who uttered the phrase to which you refer. However a
little research shows that it was apparently originally from the "Forsyte
Saga" novels about edwardian era upper-middle-class british life. You learn
something new every day.

<http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Groucho_Marx>

~~~
rdrimmie
Two things for me today! Thank you.

------
mistermann
I agree with this premise entirely....however, in the .Net world, at least in
my experiences, the smartest (in terms of raw mental capabilities and depth of
knowledge) are also the people that write the most verbose, complicated code
to do the simplest things...generally I suppose under the guise that it will
be "more flexible" I suppose. Often times after enough frustration I've
rewritten some of the code in question in one fifth the size, which handles
more scenarios, runs faster, and usually even a junior programmer could figure
it out.

I often read people making fun of the grossly overarchitected solutions in the
java world, but I personally feel the same way about the .Net world, at least
when it comes to code written by people who are in most ways genuinely the
smartest, most capable developers I have worked with.

Any other .Net people feel this way or am I missing something?

~~~
Dylanlacey
I've noticed a corresponding tendency, but amongst the most experienced (But
not most capable).

The longer someone's been a '.Net Programmer' (rather then a programmer who
does .Net) the more likely they are to over-architect, over design and use
frameworks and tools that are just...wrong.

------
levesque
When I click on 'continue reading...' it doesn't do anything. Is there
supposed to be more to the article? The last sentence I got was :

    
    
         If you’re a teacher, go where the students care about what they’re learning.

------
grammaton
"If behavior spreads through social networks, then working in a toxic or slow-
moving corporate environment is really really bad for you."

1) I think working in a toxic or slow moving corporate environment is really
bad for you for reasons much more direct than behaviors moving through a
social network

2) Researches demonstrated that certain moods and obesity appear to be
correlated in social networks - but they have not demonstrated causation or
show that this applies to behaviors and moods in general. The fact that two
nodes in a social network are likely to both be obese together only shows that
obese people move in the same social circles, and there could be a wide
variety of social and economic reasons why that are more directly causative
than two people knowing each other.

Not to be a downer, it just seems to me that this article makes an unfounded
leap there.

~~~
gfodor
Or, gravity.

------
wrjrpn
According to the papers cited about alcoholism and happiness, you are not
affected by the behavior of your coworkers. For smokers, they only claim that
coworkers influence each others' behavior within small firms, which makes
sense because people are more likely to be friends anyway and there is more
pressure to smoke socially. Even then, the confidence interval is huge; they
claim smoking cessation by a coworker decreases your chances of smoking by 34%
but with a 95% CI between 5% and 56%. I haven't read the papers, and maybe
they explain this, but I wonder what happens when more than one of your
friends stops smoking; surely they can't decrease your chances of smoking by
34% each.

------
wyclif
I gave up waiting for the page to load. Better things to do and all that.

------
JoeAltmaier
Fire clients that are worse than you? Why not just do an amazing job for them?

------
anamax
Never date anyone crazier than you are.

