Probably a very common abusive management style at high levels in many industries.
I'm often astonished by the inefficiency of project delivery, particularly in large companies.
Teams spending months building sub-systems from scratch, where there is an off the shelf(sometimes open source) tool that will do the same job and better.
Man years of work going into chasing trends like "serverless" or "microservices" for no real reason, when a monolith running on a server, could be delivered in a fraction of the time and probably do a better job than what ended up being built.
I'm convinced that paying two teams to work on the same project would often cost less than paying for the huge teams and cost overruns I've seen.
Don't get too cocky against someone that has a more humane view of what's valuable to be human. Get a grip that reality has very many shades of grey.
Then the "zero knowledge" psychopathic management style doesn't seem so smart.
No knowledge is going to be acquired that way.
It's a manager who has decided understanding the nature of the work is beneath him, when he can deploy someone else's money to wind up some insects that will run around doing the work for him and watch them struggle against each other. Literally zero knowledge, before, during and after.
When whatever result appears they will not analyze the meaning of what happened beyond punishing some insects and rewarding others.
Or until they accidentally burnt down the office building. You're right, doesn't seem so smart
Running two teams against each other just screams of waste/bad management in my opinion.
What could be ways to avoid such things
How did this work out at Apple? When you were there
How does someone even get the human and financial capital to run projects like this? I guess your first attempt with the first founding team has to ‘hit.’
Otherwise, how can you afford to triple headcount, management, etc?
Jobs was a notorious jerk [1] [2] [3], so it's not surprising that similar behavior is what gets promoted.
[1] https://www.ibtimes.co.uk/steve-wozniak-cried-jobs-kept-atar...
[2] https://www.yahoo.com/news/memoir-steve-jobs-apos-daughter-1...
Pancreatic cancer eats sugar for-fucking-breakfast. [1] He was eating nothing but fruit, and even though fructose release is regulated in its binding with fiber, its still sugar.
If Jobs had eaten nothing but bacon, steak, and eggs, we might still have him around. I forgot what folder my bookmarks are in, but there's scant - but compelling - evidence to support that a sugarless diet high in protein and fat quite literally starves pancreatic cancer.
[1] https://jeccr.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s13046-019-....
Maybe he didn’t want to be around..
As the saying goes, in software development, we can control speed, cost and quality, but only two at the same time.
And no one is afraid of "losing" and worried about problems that might cause? (Eg getting fired, even if managers say won't happen)
Capitalism is based on the idea of transplanting the survival of the fittest paradigm into the economy and that’s exactly how I’d expect it to look in practice. Especially as progress accelerates and massive wins become both scarcer and more impactful at the same time.
It also sets people against each other, creates better-than-you mental heirarchies between equal workers where non are necessary, and is essentially friendly fire in the workplace. I've never seen this end well.
Capitalism isn't just economic natural selection either, it favors those with capital, and especially the most of it, and is easily exploitable by them to tip the playing field in their favor against their competition and those below them. Your analogy is bad in both cases; natural selection means one side dies, which is not what's being described here, and is not good for one side anyway, and capitalism is not as good as cooperation anyway. The latter is far more efficient.
Any guidelines? What to think about
In addition, for each experiment you need: a defined time window, up front criteria by which to judge the results, optionally form solution ideas together, give all teams the same amount of time and opportunity, after the experiment is finished each team presents their solution in a fact based manner in perspective of the criteria. After this the teams rotate and see what they can improve on their original solution with the remarks and information from the other tracks. After this decide together or with an informed captain which solution to continue. After this there should be no hard feelings, no personal consequences. Each team should be treated equally because they all contributed to the end goal. This is what will give you a fair competition and help create team safety.
This can be done on all kind of levels, between one day for something small and two/four weeks for the bigger challenges. Making it bigger than this will incur a lot of stakes/vested interest.
> After this the teams rotate and see what they can improve on their original solution
Interesting idea
I'd disagree, internal competition (like it or not, and yes it doesn't sound fun and often doesn't feel great or fair) can be a very effective motivating strategy. And management is used to using this with sales teams, everyone in sales is always competing with each other. It's never fair, they'll have unequal markets, for example, but the competition is incredibly motivating. When I was in sales long ago, the drive to be the best and regarded as such was even more motivating than just getting more commissions. It's dog eat dog but for better or worse it works.
I often hear that about capitalism, but then the caricatural opposite is the survival of the unfit. It is quite visible when swathes of our economy that are not put on any kind of competitiveness (the DMV) end up dropping standards beyond bottom.
We need a balance in between, and we are living in this balance: We are not on either extreme side of this spectrum, the reality is more mild than all-or-nothing, and the non-fittest can still work for a less performing company and be happy with their life. It is just the temptation of big corporations with big incentives that makes some engineers too eager to work for a bad company.
Time to market trumps everything.
I worked for Apple before Jobs died. He'd frequently have several teams working on the exact same thing, in secret, and then pick the team that met his goals the best. Sometimes the "losers" would be merged into the "winning" team, but never treated well by the winners.