The folly of large teams

I came across this post on "The mythical man-month" (referring to a unit of labour) through twitter (via @finiteattention) and it really hit home. There has been a lot of complaining and hand-wringing and head-banging about the ECHOES project having grown completely out of control in a number of ways, and though self-labelled hacker-at-large Dhanji R. Prasanna wrote this post about a Google effort, it could easily have been written about all of us on ECHOES (except for the part about massive server traffic). For added fun, ECHOES also had the issue of the workers being physically in many different locations!

I would like to quote a few especially pertinent passages here:

"First, there was the dreaded endless meeting--they lasted for hours with very little being decided. Then, you started having to push people to provide...code changes that you desperately needed for your feature but that they had little to no interest in beyond the academic.
My style is to ask politely and then when I realize nothing is going to be done, to do it myself. This...does NOT work in large teams. There is simply too much system complexity for this to scale as a solution. Instead of shaving one Yak, you're shaving the entire Yak pen at the Zoo, and pretty soon traveling to Tibet to shave foreign Yaks you've never seen before and whose barbering you know little about."

So true. I'm laughing at that to keep from crying about it! Or how about this next quote? Replace "programmer" and "hacker" with "researcher"   and you definitely have ECHOES again.

"And this is the essential broader point--as a programmer you must have a series of wins, every single day. It is the Deus Ex Machina of hacker success. It is what makes you eager for the next feature, and the next after that. And a large team is poison to small wins. The nature of large teams is such that even when you do have wins, they come after long, tiresome and disproportionately many hurdles. And this takes all the wind out of them. Often when I shipped a feature it felt more like relief than euphoria."

I agree with the author that that really IS the key point about large teams-- they kill enthusiasm. It is impossible to congratulate yourself or your colleagues about any success because it took so miserably long to get there (and has likely created a wealthy of bad feeling and OTHER problems along the way). A success doesn't feel like a success any more. ON a bad day, I find it doesn't even feel like it was worth the effort to get there at all. Researchers and other people working in teams talk about "project politics" for a reason. There is not just because of the interpersonal issues that often get the label of being politics, but also the sense of protracted negotiations, constant friction, and people fighting their own disciplinary corner to the extent that they may lose sight of broader objectives.


When mini-teams are constantly barking "Fix this now! Turn attention level up to 11!" at other mini-teams, it seriously wears people down. Like in the human body, existing in a state of constant emergency contributes to the emergence of stress-related diseases (See Robert Sapolsky's excellent and entertaining book Why Zebras Don't Get Ulcers). For large teams, this takes the form of constricted communication channels, attacks of angry rhetoric, and dampened enthusiasm.


All of that said.... the author is also right when he writes of the potent blend of frustration and passion that makes such a team and project compelling and unforgettable. It's true, I totally get it. You look back fondly at the complete madness and the colleagues upon whom you wished painful deaths as you slaved away late at night, trying to fix problems and finish documents. I don't know why this should be so, as it seems like a completely insane and unreasonable way to feel about anything that has caused so much stress (for everyone!). Maybe it is some kind of cognitive dissonance reduction strategy? On the other hand, maybe it's not, I have used that term incorrectly, and Leon Festinger is now rolling over in his grave.