Handling (unintentional) damage to culture | Hacker News Reader

Handling (unintentional) damage to culture

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So basically, you've got a 10x programmer. Lucky you!

Try not to kill the goose that lays golden eggs.

First, you could talk to this programmer asking whether he/she would wish to integrate more closely with the other programmers' culture (perhaps he/she would like to but there's something preventing it, like shyness or other). But my bet is that he/she doesn't particularly care about it, and it could even be detrimental to the golden eggs production. After all, a day has only 24 hours.

If that poses a problem with respect to the rest of the team, you may try to isolate a 10x golden eggs laying team. Right, for now you only have one in that team, but cross your fingers, you could be very lucky. This isolation could be physical (have a separate branch for this other team (eg. when Steve Jobs built his team to develop the Macintosh, they worked from a separate building from the main Apple Campus)), but foremost it could be more virtual, meaning the two teams can work on different projects (or if the same project, on different modules).

Perhaps you can contract now several projects for several customers at the same time, distributing independent projects to your teams?

> First, you could talk to this programmer asking whether he/she would wish to integrate more closely with the other programmers' culture (perhaps he/she would like to but there's something preventing it, like shyness or other).

Wouldn't that seem a little forced, though? If shyness is the issue, I'm not sure what one could say to address that.

Isolation seems like a good idea. However I'm worried the rest of team would have their ego broken, or even that our startup like culture would shift to a more corporate structure. Having one or small amount of people in charge of one big thing would kill the bus factor; That would have to be accounted for somehow.

Isn't it painful to alternate between typing "her/him", "him/her", "her/his", "his/her", "she/he", "he/she"?

I wrote a browser plugin in Go (using gopherjs) that will humanize words like it, it's, and its when you press a hotkey while the cursor is on them. It will randomly pick between his/her or her/his. I'd put it on github if you like, but it would need a bit of cleaning up and work first.

It is certainly painful to read, particularly when the author is actually talking about a real person, who presumably is either a "her" or a "him."

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