[kwillets]

There seems to be a real push towards homogeneity in teams, and I've seen it lead to bullying of people with different skills.

At one point I was working with a guy who had a prototype of a complex clustering algorithm. He did a great job prototyping it in MatLab, but the company decided to have him implement a distributed version of it in C, and they pushed him unreasonably hard. I tried to convince them to leave him alone, since I and others had the skillset to get that part done, but they kept after him, and eventually killed the project and fired both of us.

This was at Autonomy; we all had a "now I get it" moment when the fraud news came out.

[VuongN]

Doing tech, especially tech startups for a while and some day you wake up thinking to yourself: if we pool all our skills together, we could build the world we ought to have by the end of next 'sprint'--But why are we all stuck building sand castles after sand castles? Yeah, when the hivemind takes over and everyone is afraid to speak up, that's when we can no longer innovate. It's great to find like-minded team mates, it's not so great when people are afraid to speak their minds due to fear of being an outcast.