
Collaborate, but only intermittently, says new study - talonx
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/08/180813160528.htm
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siruncledrew
Collaboration is another aspect of working life subject to diminishing
returns. As bad as a full day of meetings/calls/chats can be, recurring
isolation also creates a sense of boredom and job apathy. Most jobs don't
understand this and tend to take the side of over-collaborating.

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bunderbunder
Yesterday's discussion on the paper itself is here:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17753614](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17753614)

I've got a more detailed comment on that page, but, in a nutshell, I don't
think one can reasonably extrapolate these results to a business setting.

I'll go a step further here and say that I see this Science Daily article as a
great example of questionable science journalism. Critical details left
unmentioned, wild extrapolations, all that fun stuff.

~~~
quotemstr
I've soured on these sorts of behavioral study generally. They're so rife with
statistical problems and publication bias that I think they pretty much amount
to throwing darts at the truth, and as a result, whatever opinion you happen
to hold about the right way to do $X, you can find a "study" to back you up.
For or against pair programming? For or against open offices? For or against
Agile? Oh boy, the literature has a study for you! (Or, if you're into
nutrition, you can find studies for and against keto! Or for and against eggs!
:Eyeroll:)

This kind of nonsense is what I like to call anti-knowledge. It tangles our
decision making and it'd be better if it didn't exist at all.

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maxxxxx
I think this is especially true for SW engineering. You can't just constantly
discuss things but you also need uninterrupted time to try out things and see
how they work out. Then you can discuss the results again.

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Flowsion
Full study:
[http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2018/08/09/1802407115](http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2018/08/09/1802407115)

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sharemywin
Except in a winner take all environment were the best solution is most
important wouldn't it be better to have a large set of isolated individuals?

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bunderbunder
There was a third group where all members acted independently with no
communication. The difference in likelihood of finding the optimal solution
between that group and the one with intermittent communication was not found
to be statistically significant in the paper, which is probably why they don't
talk about it much. I think that knowing about it really does color the
paper's interpretation, though.

It makes the cynic in me want to say that the real take-away here is that
greedy search is more likely to get caught in a local optimum in a problem
where the search space is not convex.

It's also worth pointing out that, to achieve P<0.05 on their main result,
they had to run a LASSO regression with cross-validation. IMO, that counts as
P-hacking.

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tribesman
The biggest problem for our team has been getting people to discuss more.

On befriending everyone and getting drunk one day, i asked them why don't you
talk more at work?

They said, it's due to bad previous experience where they opened up and got
attacked. Now, they only plan to speak when absolutely necessary otherwise,
just solve the tickets assigned to me and i go home.

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bww
You don’t say. Great insight, guys.

~~~
themodelplumber
Some people, even in tech, are so afraid of being alone (often subconsciously)
that they lean heavily toward group collaboration as a sort of security
blanket. Outside-point-of-reference studies like this are really useful as
aids in getting them to loosen up and let the people they e.g. supervise have
some quiet time.

~~~
TimTheTinker
We kind of have the opposite problem on my team... all the devs tend to work
mostly alone (98+% of the time). Most of the dev communication is with the
product owner and the product engineers (non-devs).

We talk about doing pair programming or something in the next release, then we
all go back to our respective stacks of work and don’t feel like we have the
time to collaborate on anything, unless it’s a question for someone who knows
a part of the codebase better.

~~~
scarejunba
If the results in this study generalize, neither constant collaboration nor
constant isolation are good. You want people to be able to crib ideas from you
in a professional setting. You also want them to have enough time to think up
their own ideas.

I know you didn't ask for advice, but perhaps code-review and design-review is
actually all your team needs? i.e. instead of the constant collaboration of
pair programming, you work on slightly lighter weight interaction by having
pairs of people work on closely related projects code-reviewing each other and
having times where they bounce ideas off each other, but who ultimately work
alone till they produce something the other can see. A half-day boundary of
interaction (non-formalized of course) may be sufficient to allow for the
degree of collaboration to be fruitful.

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denzil_correa
Dupe from 22h ago

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17753614](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17753614)

