>I heard rumors that the CEO was making two separate teams work [. . .] separately, competing against each other.
I don't work in tech, so maybe I'm dumb to this, but why would you ever do this?
I don't work in tech, so maybe I'm dumb to this, but why would you ever do this?
IMO, the CEO had a bit of a Steve Jobs hero-worship complex, but only all the bad parts. I can absolutely see him putting two teams on the same project, and "may the best product win".
The team that "lost" would get canned, obviously (I saw it happen to two separate offices while I was there).
Part of me wishes Steve Jobs had never been brought back to Apple and died in obscurity. He's such a bad example. People idolize him, but his good parts can't be imitated, his bad parts can, and a lot of people can't seem to tell the difference.
Without dropping acid at work at least, but that seems to be frowned upon these days.
It's also the premise of David Mamet's famous play Glengarry Glen Ross.
Perhaps internal competition to that extent simply confuses customers?
XMPP was so promising.
A lot of CEOs who think they’re the next Steve Jobs, don’t understand their own tech, and presume the solution to their technical problems is a lack of “motivation”.
Creating a skilled skunk works team to handle a critical problem is a great idea. Making two? And putting them in conflict? It’s like throwing your a steak to your dogs to have them fight over dinner. Idiocy.
I think this is where strong technical leadership is needed. At some point someone needs to make a decision on the technical direction and have the conviction to stick with it.
Businesses put projects out to tender all the time, and other businesses that can provide what is wanted invest sometimes very considerable resources into putting in a bid, knowing that if they don't make the winning bid then those resources will mostly likely be completely wasted. Evidently it is still worth operating a business on that basis because the benefits when you do win outweigh the costs of the failed bids, and those costs might include reducing morale in a team who worked on a failed bid.
If that is the case across industries as a whole then economically it might make sense for a business to operate on the same basis internally for their Next Big Thing. Run multiple independent teams at the start, give them all the same brief, then see which team comes up with the most promising starting point. I don't see much of an argument for continuing the internal competition beyond the concept to prototype stage, though, unless perhaps it turned out that more than one team could produce a product that was viable in its own right without competing for the same market.