[Radim]

TL;DR:

"…the good teams all had high ‘‘average social sensitivity’’ — a fancy way of saying they were skilled at intuiting how others felt based on their tone of voice, their expressions and other nonverbal cues. One of the easiest ways to gauge social sensitivity is to show someone photos of people’s eyes and ask him or her to describe what the people are thinking or feeling — an exam known as the Reading the Mind in the Eyes test. People on the more successful teams in Woolley’s experiment scored above average on the Reading the Mind in the Eyes test. They seemed to know when someone was feeling upset or left out. People on the ineffective teams, in contrast, scored below average. They seemed, as a group, to have less sensitivity toward their colleagues."

"When Rozovsky and her Google colleagues encountered the concept of psychological safety in academic papers, it was as if everything suddenly fell into place. One engineer, for instance, had told researchers that his team leader was ‘‘direct and straightforward, which creates a safe space for you to take risks.’’ That team, researchers estimated, was among Google’s accomplished groups. By contrast, another engineer had told the researchers that his ‘‘team leader has poor emotional control.’’ He added: ‘‘He panics over small issues and keeps trying to grab control. I would hate to be driving with him being in the passenger seat, because he would keep trying to grab the steering wheel and crash the car.’’ That team, researchers presumed, did not perform well."

The weasel-wording around "researchers estimated' and "researchers presumed" doesn't exactly inspire confidence. Though that may be just the NYT article, not the study itself (what's the actual data?).

I can only imagine this well-intentioned research was the seed of some internal directives, which eventually turned into a cargo-cult dogma, leading to things like the James Damore fiasco. The road to hell paved with good intentions and all that.

[gaius]

which eventually turned into a cargo-cult dogma

It's very clearly culturally biased too. If you have ever done any training in this area you know that different cultures (even if they appear racially similar) do facial expressions, eye contact, and so on differently. Maybe all we are seeing here is that white people can read the facial expressions of white people...

[microcolonel]

> It's very clearly culturally biased too. If you have ever done any training in this area you know that different cultures (even if they appear racially similar) do facial expressions, eye contact, and so on differently. Maybe all we are seeing here is that white people can read the facial expressions of white people...

I'm under the impression that the cultural differences are largely in how much you let out, not in what the expression looks like when you do.

[gaius]

I'm under the impression that the cultural differences are largely in how much you let out, not in what the expression looks like when you do.

Annoyance vs anger is all in how much you let out, no?

[zbobet2012]

Uh no? I'm not angry when I'm annoyed... I'm annoyed.

[Tempest1981]

In both cases, the key is that your team members can detect that something is not right, or could be improved, and respond.

[goialoq]

That facial-emotional recognition was a famous case of stereotype bias:

http://www.creativitypost.com/psychology/gender_bias_in_the_...

[new299]

Interesting, I just tried a version of the readings the mind in the eyes test here:

http://socialintelligence.labinthewild.org/mite/

The test seemed somewhat biased to a certain social background however.

[golemotron]

> One of the easiest ways to gauge social sensitivity is to show someone photos of people’s eyes and ask him or her to describe what the people are thinking or feeling — an exam known as the Reading the Mind in the Eyes test. People on the more successful teams in Woolley’s experiment scored above average on the Reading the Mind in the Eyes test.

What isn't mentioned is that the 'Mind in the Eyes' test is used to assess autism and spectrum conditions.

If that kind of empathy is necessary for good teamwork then the neuro-diverse are at a disadvantage in that type of work and systematically excluded from companies that do all of their work in teams. Companies that take this seriously could assess where teamwork is important - and where it isn't - and hire appropriately.

[andrewflnr]

Where do you think teamwork is not important? Such circumstances are vanishingly rare at best, mostly debatable, and will get rarer as humanity's ambition increasingly exceeds the capabilities of individuals. Meanwhile, having the ability to work with others will always be better than not.

[dasmoth]

Writing novels has always been a primarily-solo activity. I don't see demand for those dropping off drastically.

The guy who re-plumbled my house was working there alone pretty much all the time. That seems to be a common way of working in many trades, and plumbers don't seem desperate for work.

A fair number of bits of heavily-used software started out as one person's project (many of the successful ones do eventually morph into community projects, but titles like "benevolant dictator for life" show that community doesn't necessarily mean a flat "team" setup). Lots of programming languages fall in this category. Sublime Text. Indy games (and, not so very long ago, the majority of games). Building software as a solo endeavour does seem to be somewhat out of fashion right now, but that doesn't necessarily mean it can't work.

[golemotron]

So it's okay to discriminate against people with disabilities?

There are many areas where individual work shines. Legal research, accounting, auto repair. I think the same is true in software.

[bobby_the_whale]

What's your definition of teamwork? If it is that in order to complete a large task (e.g. building an iPhone) that it is beneficial to work together with others, it's obvious, because even the best engineer in the world doesn't live long enough to fix everything currently.

If however you are saying that there exist many tasks for which you actually work together to come up for a solution for a known problem, I doubt that.

Case in point: Perelman.

To make it more concrete: if one is using cloud services, is one working together with that could service people? Is that teamwork? I don't think so. Yet, it is cooperation.

In jobs where you need to hold a heavy object in place such that someone else can put a nail somewhere is only teamwork, because of technological limitations. Robots that can do this already exist, but they are too expensive. As such, I also don't count those classes of work as teamwork.

Taking the above into consideration, what remains of your "teamwork"?

[andrewflnr]

Perhaps "teamwork" is not the best term, if it invites such a narrow interpretation. But even for mere "cooperation" as you put it, empathy is needed. In your cloud service example, if a client ever needs tech support, at least the support person is trying to read the client's mind, or they're not doing their job. Even in the case of holding up heavy objects, don't underestimate the value of sensitivity to the other person's needs; I've been on both sides of screwups in that area.

GP asked about hiring at companies, so solo projects are either not germane, or an illusion. Are you the only dev on a project that serves larger business goals? You're on a team! You need to understand how your work fits in with others' efforts, and either adjust or explain how others should adjust instead, most likely both. Oh, and don't forget to document everything, another empathy-heavy task. I think we all know this; it's just another way of discovering the meme that devs who understand the business go farther.

Part of the point I was trying to make is that those "large projects" you were talking about are going to become more common and more important, out-competing smaller teams that are almost by definition less capable in terms of feature output. If a solo dev outcompetes a team, it's because they were better at empathizing with customers. If that's not exactly teamwork, it doesn't avoid the problem, either.