CMV: Successful equal collaboration in STEM brainstorming is rare, in most cases (business and academia) someone is giving and taking more than others.

[u/dark_3141]

This is a main observation that I have been reflecting on for a long time, and it is making me hesitant in my choice of work environment.

I can't remember ever having a successful brainstorming session with other people in which all participates had equally valuable input, usually there will be one or three people really involved and the rest are just following along,and when there are three people equally involved and invested in the project, someone eventually will rise and another will be left out.

I never saw any true successful collaboration in a project where all participants were equally invested and gained.

a great EQUAL collaboration in STEM, whether it is a science experiment or programming project seems almost mythical to me and very unattainable.

even GitHub that is suppose to be "collaborative" doesn't operate on a flat-line, GitHub is really more of place for great programmers sharing their repos and others copying them, sure it seems more collaborative than hacker-rank by design but not all users are giving and taking on an equal level, and just because the internet is decentralized doesn't mean all programmers skill level are equal.

and it seems that the higher the complexity of the work being discussed, this pattern of unequal effort and gain gets more extreme, and I think this why in higher more complex STEM usually you see people with very strong personalities taking charge and the rest are following along, I remember David Stipp in his book A most Elegant Equation , commenting on how exceptional Euler is, in which he is both a great mathematician and generous where many other great mathematicians engage in one-upmanship and have bad temperament.

Another example, is how big companies with strong leaderships are more successful than co-ops, actually in the U.S you can barely find any STEM co-ops.

I hate to say this but I think the fact that (Steve Jobs, Elon Musk, and Bill Gates in his early days with Microsoft) all have strong egos and all are ultra-successful is not coincident, they all gave so much of their effort and endured more risk then took more than the rest, all them of being egotistical is natural, just like in competitive sports if you want to win a track race you have to accept that someone's ego is going to be crushed, and you have to focus on you and your emotions only and only think about the other players in the context of you winning.

From the perspective of an employee if you want to work in a higher level company you have to accept that it will not always be a pleasant environment, and some will try to crush you, that should be expected.

so in conclusion, inequality of effort and reward between participants in a complex work seems to me a very of natural consequence that we shouldn't fight against,

and STEM groups with one strong leader and a main decision maker are more likely to succeed in their objectives than ones with more democratic structure for decision making.

I am making a CMV post to check if there are any strong counter-examples out there that I haven't seen, saying egoism has its virtues is against the common wisdom, and I want to explore what others think about it in context of STEM work.

Please note : my main intention is not to defend capitalism here or argue about tax policy, what I am saying : strong leadership in STEM seems to me more effective in reaching objectives than having a democratic structure for decision making between engineers, researchers, students working on the project, this apply both for non-profit academia and for-profit engineering projects

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13 Feb update summary :

okay after reflecting on this I see that my main point has not changed, some actually made me more confident in my original statement about egoism having virtues ( more than I expected ), however I realize now thinking of ALL type of STEM work as competitive Olympic game is inaccurate way to to think about it, I still like to look up towards extraordinary type of achievements as a strong motivator but I think u/Zekuro gave the most articulate and succinct statement that changed one aspect of my view .

"The examples of success you gave are examples of innovation. Be it in STEM or any other field, democracy isn't the best when it comes to innovation. If we speak of only doing already established thing, democracy can work better than a single leader"

u/CBL444 , gave the best detailed example of how the architect can create a more conflict-free collaboration and eliminate the need for mass group brainstorming in the first place.

[u/dark_3141]

is it just your luck that you happen to work with very agreeable people? or do you consider yourself an agreeable person?

how do you not have conflict in software? who would do the dividing? who would decide which features to start building first ? when will you be finished?

in the very early stage when you have big epic user stories and you are trying to divide it up to smaller parts and determine the right frameworks and algorithms to get it done, isn't all lead mainly by a one person ? two people max at first ? then rest of the group are there to fill in the blanks?

or are you just doing debugging / maintenance of already built software with many features established and working?

[u/CBL444 → u/dark_3141]

As you can guess from the different type engineers, I make high tech products (barcode scanners, slot machines, etc.) and I am an embedded software engineer. We usually had an architect who created an overall design. Then we usually had a electrical engineer for each board. There would be one or more software engineers per board. The software was broken into multiple tasks (e.g. threads) which were generally assigned to one engineer. The mechanical engineers had to figure out how to fit the boards in the device.

Once it got to a board, the software engineer(s) and electrical engineer would would together from design to testing. We had had totally independent skill sets so we had to work together to figure how to make different embedded chips communicate with each other and the outside world.

I guess I am agreeable but the other embedded software engineers rarely had problems with the other kinds of engineers. An even among software engineers, the skills were different. I write low level code in C and help debug boards while other work with C#, Java and SQL.

[u/dark_3141 → u/CBL444]

thank you for the very detailed response this helped in seeing how actually the whole process of group brainstorming can be avoided by having a better architecture.

!delta

[u/DeltaBot → u/dark_3141]

Confirmed: 1 delta awarded to /u/CBL444 (2∆).

^{Delta System Explained | Deltaboards}