Generality creep

[H. S. Teoh]

On Fri, Mar 29, 2019 at 07:45:35PM -0400, Adam D. Ruppe via Digitalmars-d wrote:
> On Friday, 29 March 2019 at 16:26:06 UTC, Andrei Alexandrescu wrote:
> > It's most interesting what happens with Walter.
[...]
> Walter is a brilliant programmer whose historic experience is
> exceedingly valuable. You're also an excellent programmer and a good
> writer who brings very valuable higher-thought discipline to library
> design.
> 
> Where you guys are weak is project management. A project manager needs
> to set clear expectations, facilitate communication among the team,
> prioritize work based on real world requirements, and motivate the
> team to do that work, striking the right balance between autonomy and
> direction to maintain morale while meeting requirements.

+1.

I spent the last hour writing a whole bunch of stuff to respond to this,
but decided instead to distill it all to just two things:

(1) It's clear that Walter & Andrei excel at technical expertise, but
lack in the people skills department.  This has been shown time and
again in the way various interactions with different people panned out
over the years.  (Please don't take this as an insult or a personal
attack, because I don't intend it that way, and I also recognize myself
to be belong to the same category. We techie types simply aren't good at
people skills, that's all there is to it.)

(2) OTOH, people skills are exactly what's needed to foster a healthy,
thriving community around D.  It's unrealistic to expect a volunteer-run
open source project to operate the same way as a company that pays its
employees to do assigned work.  A volunteer project *can* produce work
of equivalent quality, but the lack of monetary compensation must be
replaced by a different kind of "currency": an equivalent amount of
inspirational leadership. I.e., inspire the people enough and they'll go
out of their way to do whatever you want, pay or no pay. And a big part
of this is effective communication of the high-level goals of the
project and what's expected of would-be contributions. Fail to do that,
and be prepared for the same reaction you might get if you gave an
employee a sudden big pay cut while still expecting the same amount (and
quality) of work as before.

The lack of manpower, etc., are not a cause of our problems; it's a
symptom of our lack of proper leadership (in the social sense --
clearly, W&A have excellent technical leadership; but that's not what's
missing here).  I don't blame Walter and Andrei for this -- we techie
types just aren't good at this sort of stuff.  We need a manager who is.

tl;dr: Walter & Andrei shouldn't be expected to bear the brunt of the
social aspect of community building. That's not their forte, and even if
they could do it, it'd be a waste of their technical talents.  We need a
proper manager who can do a good job with the community-related /
people-related stuff, and leave W&A to do what they're best at doing.


> I'm sure facebook has some good managers who keep that room of
> engineers focused on the big picture and willing to come back to work
> week after week. D needs a good manager too. They make a real
> difference.
> 
> I betcha if we got a good manager, contributors would be a lot happier
> working in a shared direction and the manpower problems the PR queue
> sees now would evaporate. And best of all, it'd let you and Walter go
> back to doing the awesome work you really excel at, instead of arguing
> with the community so much.

Yes and yes.  It's about time we acknowledge where our weaknesses lie,
and take real steps at fixing the problem, instead of continuing to lie
to ourselves with the fantasy that social problems can be cured by
technical expertise.  We techie types all wish it were so, but sadly the
real world simply doesn't work that way.


T

-- 
Claiming that your operating system is the best in the world because more people use it is like saying McDonalds makes the best food in the world. -- Carl B. Constantine