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Comment by ivanhoe | Hacker News Reader

There's one thing I've learned from white water rafting: On slow parts democracy works fine - everyone discussing about the best path - but when things start happening fast you need a single captain to make the calls, otherwise you end up hitting every single rock in the river while trying to agree if it's better to go left or right around it.

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That's a good point when in that situation. But it's worth remembering that in development people are rarely in that situation. For various reasons, however people (including me) often bring that kind of emergency thinking into development and it just shows things down. Rushing into the debugger instead of slowing down for a minute and thinking about it for a minute. Doing a little bit of design and thinking about what I want from the system instead of getting lost in the details of the existing implementation.

Most of the time in development we need to slow down to go much faster. It's nothing like white water rafting (it would be cool though if it could be like rafting sometimes - everyone gets sick of having to slow down all the time at some point)

In this case, I understood the rapids to mean things like production incidents necessitating a coordinated incident response system with well-defined roles and responsibilities.

It’s important to have an Incident Commander, but that goes by the oncall rotation, no the org chart.

That's true. We have a dedicated triage team. In the land of Microservices it probably makes the most sense as it's probably harder than ever to pin down the group to fix something in a large org.

As I read it, the point of the article is to explain how you deal with decisions when the "captain" can be anyone in a group, and not some designated hierarchical leader.

It's not democracy per se: for instance a designer can come with a proposition to give people a chance to review it. In the rafting example they're basically saying "we go right", and will do so if nobody shouts "there's a cliff on the right".

Look at the time, it is hair-splitting o'clock! >_>

Having a single captain can still be a democratic system; what is being replaced isn't the democratic element (where power rests with the people) - that is still in place. What is being changed is swapping a deliberative assembly (or committee or something) for a single executive for making decisions.

So what is being identified is technically something like 'deliberative assemblies are better at dividing up resources and responsibilities but single executives are better at implementing policies and achieving outcomes'.

Interestingly, this is a lesson that is implicitly very well understood by major democracies without being explicitly bought up very often.

This is fairly topical point. Yet in terms of maximizing stability, it seems like those democracies that do -not- vest too much executive power in a single person tend to fair better. Many presidential systems which adhere to strict notions of unitary executive theory are finding themselves at the mercy of unaccountable and uncontrollable leaders, while parliamentary and semi-presidential systems which better distribute executive authority and retain close accountability to democratic feedback mechanisms fair better.

Look at the time, it is hair-splitting o'clock! >_>

Stop! Pedanto-Time!

^_^

a somewhat similar phenomenon happens in basketball. when the game is not competitive, no leader is needed and everyone just plays to their ability (and hopefully to their strengths).

but when the game gets competitive, it's easy to fall apart and get beaten without a leader. on offense, that's usually the point guard (e.g., steph curry), who implicitly chooses who gets the ball, when they get it, and for how long. on defense, a forward/center (e.g., draymond green), who can see the whole floor in front of them, often has the responsibility of coordinating the defense to minimize gaps and mismatches.

Perhaps you need "situational captains"? Identify strengths/weaknesses of your own staff and when SHTF, delegate to one that can employ their strengths to resolve your situation, while keeping communication channels open to the rest of your team in case somebody has a better idea?

I believe most people would appreciate if they weren't infantilized and forced to defer to some dysfunctional hierarchy.

If you haven’t got a situational captain on your floor then, well, you probably don’t have a highly profitable and hugely successful multinational company.

Sounds kind of like holocracy.

For very slow parts a captain is probably also more helpful. I.e. if you were on the open ocean, you should probably listen to one person that has some kind of compass, instead of going in circles.

But democracies are capable of producing such leaders when required, as England did for the Second World War.

One boat one captain!

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