Accept Only What You've Understood
Spotify had a model of squads, chapters and guilds, which received some attention. I never understood what it meant. I couldn’t figure out whether these were new names for old concepts, which is old wine in a new bottle, or whether the new names represented fundamentally new concepts. I tried to read up on this, but never found any substantive explanation or discussion. One person I was talking to spoke admiringly of the Spotify squad model. I eagerly asked him what was good about it, hoping to learn, but he could not tell me. He just said it’s good and that’s it.
So I remained sceptical 1. I did not recommend this model to anyone I know, nor to the companies I worked with, sticking with a traditional model.
And now I came across this insightful post showing why the model failed, and why Spotify never implemented it fully in the first place. I immediately realised my scepticism was right.
There’s a lot of noise and hype, some spread by naïve people. And some spread by people with a vested interest, like Mongo lying that SQL databases are not scalable. Some of this hype comes from people jumping on every new bandwagon, confusing new for better. Some of this comes from people who want to appear knowledgeable by parroting something new2. Some of this comes from people who lack the self-confidence to trust their judgment. Or are afraid of questioning the hype, because defenders will criticise them, and they’re afraid of getting into a discussion about the merits.
Whatever the reason, there’s a lot of noise out there, which you should insulate yourself from.
Be a scientist, remaining sceptical about unproven claims. If it’s right, you’ll hear a compelling argument sooner or later, and you can revise your opinion then, just as science accepts a theory when it’s proved. You don’t need to be the first to recognise something. If it were valid, it’s likely to have been discovered earlier. That’s a better tradeoff than exhibiting poor judgment.
One sign of bullshit is new-age jargon. If someone can’t say “team”, instead feeling the need to say “chapter”, “guild”, or if someone can’t say “manager”, instead feeling the need to say “mayor”, watch out, because people who have little new to say typically invent this evasive bullshit to avoid being pinned down. Those who have something profound to say can explain it in simple language.
Scepticism doesn’t mean closed-mindedness. I’m constantly on the lookout for new perspectives to validate the new idea, but till I find a compelling one, I won’t act based on the new idea.
Including me a decade back, who felt smug going around saying SQL databases are old and busted.