We hit the "opinion overload" problem at dotCloud about a year ago, at 10 employees. It took us a while to fix it. We could feel the beginning of a vicious circle where an eloquent opinion brought the same peer recognition as a working piece of code. The symptoms were more talking, less coding, recurring debates which everybody was sick of but nobody could put to rest, and worst of all, a tendency to say "I told you so" and blame each other for oversights. We noticed this when junior hires started mimicking the most verbose "opinionaters" instead of the most prolific doers. The wrong "genes" were reproducing in the company's dna!
Fortunately we found a solution and the group self-corrected wonderfully. The team is now 20 strong and an awesome no-bullshit engineering culture. We found that the key to a constructive conversation is to have an owner: someone in charge of the subject at hand, who is held responsible for the result, and in return has authority on how to go about it. Everyone else in the conversation is a peer, voicing their opinion non-authoritatively and acknowledging that the owner has the final say. Rule of thumb: ask "who's the owner?". If there's no clear answer, you're not getting work done.
In a group of smart and trusted people, this creates a culture where you earn your spurs with what you do, not what you say. Opinions become more like washing the dishes: useful and necessary, but not something that will get you pats in the back either. In fact if you take your dishwashing skills too seriously you might find yourself a source of amusement.
We later found out that Pixar uses a very similar peer feedback system for its productions.
Fortunately we found a solution and the group self-corrected wonderfully. The team is now 20 strong and an awesome no-bullshit engineering culture. We found that the key to a constructive conversation is to have an owner: someone in charge of the subject at hand, who is held responsible for the result, and in return has authority on how to go about it. Everyone else in the conversation is a peer, voicing their opinion non-authoritatively and acknowledging that the owner has the final say. Rule of thumb: ask "who's the owner?". If there's no clear answer, you're not getting work done.
In a group of smart and trusted people, this creates a culture where you earn your spurs with what you do, not what you say. Opinions become more like washing the dishes: useful and necessary, but not something that will get you pats in the back either. In fact if you take your dishwashing skills too seriously you might find yourself a source of amusement.
We later found out that Pixar uses a very similar peer feedback system for its productions.