
IBM's infamous "Black Team" (2002) - RiderOfGiraffes
http://www.t3.org/tangledwebs/07/tw0706.html
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DrJokepu
This story made me think. Until now I had the impression that mediocrity at
large corporations is inevitable no matter how many smart people they employ,
simply due to the size of the corporation. For every talented, competent
employee they have 10 average or below-average employees. Even at Google, even
(and especially) at Microsoft. Competent people cannot choose who to work with
so whatever extra they do is lost in the mediocrity that surrounds them.

After reading this article I have realized that even at large corporations if
you make isolated and largely idependent small teams of highly competent
people that can select their members themselves, you can create "startup"
bubbles inside the organization that can deliver outstanding results. Maybe
this is the way to go when growing large, from a medium-sized enterprise to a
large corporation?

~~~
philwelch
It's not a new concept. Look up Kelly Johnson and the Lockheed Skunk Works.

~~~
ramchip
And, IMHO even more importantly, Semco.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ricardo_Semler>

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DannoHung
Whatever happened to that team?

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sdevlin
They talk about them in (I think) Peopleware. It's part of a segment talking
about how fostering a unique culture for your team can increase motivation.
They mention that this culture persisted in the Black Team after all its
original members had moved on. I'm not sure how long it continued on after
that.

~~~
sh1mmer
If you haven't read Peopleware you really should. It's one of the best books
on managing people working in IT around, still. If you like Spolsky, DeMarco
and Lister were talking about this stuff years ago.

~~~
Luc
It seems to be out of print: <http://www.amazon.com/dp/0932633439/> . $95
second hand... Is it worth it?

~~~
gcheong
You can get it from the publisher ~$46 ($39.95 + $6SH):
<http://www.dorsethouse.com/books/pw.html>

You might also try a local brick and mortar bookstore.

~~~
gcheong
The 39.95 price includes shipping (UPS ground). Read it wrong the first time.

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colbyolson
"Pictures or it didn't happen!"

Edit: I tried searching for anything related to IBM and their Black Team. It
seems Google saturates my search request with everything linking back to this
article.

Perhaps someone could help?

~~~
nomoresecrets
As mentioned already, the book Peopleware has a section the Black Team, which
predates this article by quite a few years.

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willwagner
Having worked in similar environments in the early 90's on desktop software,
there are some serious downsides to this approach.

Basically, it can lead to having a rift between developers and QA, and in a
big corporation, it can become a bureaucratic mess and a 'us' vs. 'them'
attitude between groups. I've been in long heated meetings between QA and Dev
arguing over individual bugs, not so much on behalf of the customer as opposed
to face-saving exercise.

From the article: "And the things they did to software went beyond all bounds
of rational use testing and were more akin to software torture." In a perfect
world with unlimited time, it's great to find bugs through contortions but
usually there is some costs associated with it either with QA not focused on
other areas that matter, or having a developer focused on confirming that bug
as opposed to working on something else.

Sometimes it's great in a bigger organization to have a unique culture so I
agree with the jist of the article and to other HN comments. For instance, I
worked at a company on a smaller Macintosh team that fostered a healthy
competition with the much bigger Windows team which worked well. I'm just not
so sure it works well when people are essentially working on the same project
where interfacing with each other is a requirement.

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alexandros
I think a crucial reason this worked is that there was a measurable objective,
the value of which was universally understandable. Find software bugs. This is
how they measured and selected the initial team, and this is how the team
itself could prove its effectiveness in a management-compatible, objective
manner and therefore defend its existence. Finding other areas where this
could work is an interesting excercise.

~~~
tcskeptic
I agree that measurability is important, but there are plenty of measurable
objectives that don't inspire this sort of espirit de corp exhibitted here. I
would love to know more about the leadership of this group, and if the
leadership of the group fostered this sort of group identification. Is there a
leadership lesson here, or did this emerge organically?

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rayvega
Timeless. Not just that this happened in the 60's, but I didn't notice the
publish date (2002) of the post itself until _after_ reading it.

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raheemm
Its pitiful that building bug-free software is considered legendary. Speaks
volumes about our industry.

~~~
alexgartrell
Systems got orders of magnitude more complicated, time to release got orders
of magniture shorter, and everything got a whole hell of a lot better.

~~~
raheemm
You could make the same arguments in every industry that exists, somehow
software is the only one that gets away with it. Even our counterparts in
hardware are held to a higher standard.

Djikstra and Hoare are the only ones who tried to advance a higher standard
and yet beyond naming an award for one and singing praises of the other, the
field has continued to accept lesser standards.

~~~
tlb
Desktop computers have tens of millions of lines of active software, and for
most users they only exhibit a bug every week or so. By any measure, that
level of reliability far exceeds any other industry. Chipmakers achieve
0.999999 reliability, which is impressive, but if software had only that level
of reliability it would crash every millisecond.

~~~
raheemm
Setting aside all other factors (complexity, progress made, resources
available, etc), I would argue that the culture of bug acceptance has lead to
more bugs in software than would have existed had it been less tolerant.

~~~
astine
It has also lead to more software than would exist otherwise.

~~~
nvoorhies
And software that's orders of magnitude cheaper than it would be if error
free.

------
wouterinho
"Some individuals even grew long mustaches which they would twirl with
melodramatic flair as they savaged a programmer's code."

Love it!

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raptorex
maybe I'm just feeling negative today, but this sounds like some bullshit to
me. it sounds like the kind of thing that would be appealing to managers:
having "not exceptionally intelligent or talented" employees who become
completely obsessed with doing their jobs. great, you can pay them average
salaries and they will be so loyal to your giant company. the story and the
events themselves are fine, but I feel like the reason this story (and some of
these details seem pretty apocryphal to me, like programmers crying because of
bug reports) is so popular is that management types are taking the wrong
lesson from it: that it would be desirable if employees were unhealthily
obsessed with doing their jobs. then they try and manipulate their own people
into doing the same thing.

~~~
numbchuckskills
"great, you can pay them average salaries and they will be so loyal to your
giant company"

The point is that they become loyal to each other, the company reaping a
reward is just a side benefit of people working towards a common goal.

I was on a similar 'elite' skunkworks dev team in a company of ~ 35,000 that
had executive support, and the results were insanely good. You can't
manipulate people to do this; You can however give them the freedom to make it
happen.

~~~
potatolicious
I've had the opportunity to work on much smaller 'elite' teams before (7-10
people), and if I didn't have to eat and pay rent I'd do it for free.

The amount of productivity, support, and "you grok me"-ness is so extreme that
it's really a wonder to behold. As a regular dev now I really do look back on
those days and wish I can do it all over again.

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mtrichardson
I really, really hope that the team that's in charge of Apple's app review
process doesn't start emulating these guys, with legal things instead of
technical things. Though it seems like they kind of already have.

