<story><title>Beware offers of “help” with your projects</title><url>http://misc-stuff.terraaeon.com/articles/beware-help.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>rob74</author><text>&amp;gt; &lt;i&gt;Something I have noticed is that the more people join a project, the more it begins to go off the rails, and the less productive each member of the team becomes. [...] many of the newcomers spend the bulk of their time, if not actually sabotaging the project, doing the next best thing. They do their best to drive the project in the wrong direction. In so doing, they waste the valuable time of everyone around them who is forced to clean up the messes they leave behind. These are intelligent people, so I do not believe they are incapable of understanding the vision that caused the project to be born. I think, rather, they just don&amp;#x27;t care. Some call this &amp;quot;not being a team player&amp;quot;, but I call it narcissism.&lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;Er... reading this, I would rather suspect the author of &amp;quot;not being a team player&amp;quot;. Of course, if other developers find your project interesting and want to contribute, they may have their own features and use cases in mind that don&amp;#x27;t necessarily overlap with what you have planned, which doesn&amp;#x27;t however mean that it has to be a &amp;quot;wrong direction&amp;quot;. As the owner of the project, you are free to accept their contributions or not, and they are free to fork the project and take it into another direction if you don&amp;#x27;t like that direction.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>Applejinx</author><text>&amp;gt;Er... reading this, I would rather suspect the author of &amp;quot;not being a team player&amp;quot;&lt;p&gt;If he&amp;#x27;s in charge of the project&amp;#x27;s direction and has a specific vision that must be accomplished, that&amp;#x27;s not his job.&lt;p&gt;Unfortunately, if random people passing by are able to steer the project into the ditch and cause it to fail its most basic requirements (as he describes) then he&amp;#x27;s bad at his job (which isn&amp;#x27;t &amp;#x27;being a team player&amp;#x27;).&lt;p&gt;He&amp;#x27;s bad at his job because what he describes seems like a total inability to sell people on WHY to pursue his end goals. If proliferation of devs leads to the project going more and more off the rails, he&amp;#x27;s getting people who are drawn in by something or other, and feel no connection to the basic purpose of the software. That&amp;#x27;s on him. His job is to make them understand why his purpose matters, and it&amp;#x27;s like he&amp;#x27;s producing a codebase easily adapted to other purposes, but it somehow doesn&amp;#x27;t get across his purpose.&lt;p&gt;Maybe he needs to hire a writer, not devs :)</text></comment>
<story><title>Beware offers of “help” with your projects</title><url>http://misc-stuff.terraaeon.com/articles/beware-help.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>rob74</author><text>&amp;gt; &lt;i&gt;Something I have noticed is that the more people join a project, the more it begins to go off the rails, and the less productive each member of the team becomes. [...] many of the newcomers spend the bulk of their time, if not actually sabotaging the project, doing the next best thing. They do their best to drive the project in the wrong direction. In so doing, they waste the valuable time of everyone around them who is forced to clean up the messes they leave behind. These are intelligent people, so I do not believe they are incapable of understanding the vision that caused the project to be born. I think, rather, they just don&amp;#x27;t care. Some call this &amp;quot;not being a team player&amp;quot;, but I call it narcissism.&lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;Er... reading this, I would rather suspect the author of &amp;quot;not being a team player&amp;quot;. Of course, if other developers find your project interesting and want to contribute, they may have their own features and use cases in mind that don&amp;#x27;t necessarily overlap with what you have planned, which doesn&amp;#x27;t however mean that it has to be a &amp;quot;wrong direction&amp;quot;. As the owner of the project, you are free to accept their contributions or not, and they are free to fork the project and take it into another direction if you don&amp;#x27;t like that direction.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>Closi</author><text>There is a minor irony that the author has another blogpost on how micromanaging bosses are awful, because they insist that you should work their way rather than your own way.&lt;p&gt;Perhaps the learning here is just &amp;quot;managing engineers to deliver something cohesive isn&amp;#x27;t straightforward&amp;quot;. It&amp;#x27;s obviously true that an open source project can have good coding standards with multiple contributors of different skill levels, but you get there by managing the project really well.&lt;p&gt;And while more engineers can mean that an individual engineer is slower, the idea is that with good management and engineering the aggregate output can increase with each engineer (i.e. Having 10 engineers who only work at 25% of the pace of a standalone engineer will still output 2.5x as much as a single engineer. At scale it is the teams output that matters, not the output of an individual engineer).</text></comment>