Comment by plinkplonk | Hacker News Reader

Comment by plinkplonk | Hacker News Reader

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"You just put some really smart people together in a room, throw a tough problem at them, get out of the way, and watch the magic happen.

The magic doesn't happen when nobody has met each other and communication is limited to telephone, email, and IM."

Someone should tell the Linux Kernel (and other Open Source dev, where a lot of terrific "as magic as it can get" sw dev happens) guys.

No, I am not saying that OS dev is the same as commercial dev, or even that what you are saying is essentially wrong.

I am just challenging the absolute nature of "The magic doesn't happen when nobody has met each other and communication is limited to telephone, email, and IM." Plenty of "magic" does happen every day when people who know each other only by their irc handles or email ids work together on a codebase.

Whether such activity can be harnessed to help a commercial dev effort is certainly debatable (and there are many good points on either side of the issuel), but the idea of confining "magic" in software dev to only dev teams working in the same room is somewhat dubious (imho, ymmv etc).

That said, time to party here in Bangalore. Happy New Year, everyone!

Fair point. I over-generalized as well. Just note that I am all in favor of remote work. The trick is reproducing those teams that kick ass. I've seen a lot of configurations, and from what I've seen it usually doesn't work that well. The dream is awesome, and it's the future. It's the damn execution that's tough.

The trick in addressing technology development is to choose the right level of generalization. At some point, you're going to be communicating in leaky abstractions no matter what you say. My overall critique of the article was that the few paragraphs the author provided wasn't deep enough and led to a false impression, not that remote work is somehow unworkable. I could easily post some HN click-bait like "SOPA is the Devil!" and watch the votes climb. What would be tough to do -- and much more useful -- is to provide some kind of analysis where both sides were presented, along with some possible solutions. The first kind of article is a waste of my Saturday morning. The second kind gets me to thinking some. I like that a lot better.

Agreed, in fact for non trivial problems almost the opposite is true in my experience. For me at least spontaneous brainstorming meetings are usually a waste of time; I'd much rather take some time alone to think over a problem and put my thoughts on paper or email than coming up with half-baked brainfarts on the spot. Similarly for understanding and evaluating what others have to say, the signal-to-noise ratio of a well thought written paper/email/presentation is more meaningful than a bunch of random ideas thrown around in a meeting.

Once there is a basic plan in place, face time (or phone/IM) are fine to flesh out smaller issues, Q&A, etc.

But the Linux community didn't appear overnight. It's grown very slowly over twenty years.

May I ask what open source products you view as "magic"? Linux is great, but I guess I don't view an OS that has been in development for 20 years and is still mainly constrained to server apps as "magic". And there's very few other open source projects that are used vanilla without some dedicated team sanding down all the rough edges (Unix -> Mac OS, Webkit -> Safari/Chrome, etc)

> Someone should tell the Linux Kernel (and other Open Source dev, where a lot of terrific "as magic as it can get" sw dev happens) guys.

Apparently someone did. The express purpose of the Kernel Developers Summit is to work out problems that couldn't be resolved online.

A summit once a year doesn't change the fact that the default mode of working is still remote and distributed.

An equivalent would be someone working 9 to 5 in an office and doing two days of "work from home" in a year.

"Someone should tell the Linux Kernel (and other Open Source dev, where a lot of terrific "as magic as it can get" sw dev happens) guys."

Open source projects generally have no deadlines. It's always a work in progress. So, team "magic" isn't really necessary.

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