IBM's infamous "Black Team" (2002)

http://www.t3.org/tangledwebs/07/tw0706.html

234 62 17 years ago

DannoHung• 17 years ago

Whatever happened to that team?

sdevlin• 17 years ago

They talk about them in (I think) Peopleware. It's part of a segment talking about how fostering a unique culture for your team can increase motivation. They mention that this culture persisted in the Black Team after all its original members had moved on. I'm not sure how long it continued on after that.

sh1mmer2• 17 years ago

If you haven't read Peopleware you really should. It's one of the best books on managing people working in IT around, still. If you like Spolsky, DeMarco and Lister were talking about this stuff years ago.

DrJokepu• 17 years ago

This story made me think. Until now I had the impression that mediocrity at large corporations is inevitable no matter how many smart people they employ, simply due to the size of the corporation. For every talented, competent employee they have 10 average or below-average employees. Even at Google, even (and especially) at Microsoft. Competent people cannot choose who to work with so whatever extra they do is lost in the mediocrity that surrounds them.

After reading this article I have realized that even at large corporations if you make isolated and largely idependent small teams of highly competent people that can select their members themselves, you can create "startup" bubbles inside the organization that can deliver outstanding results. Maybe this is the way to go when growing large, from a medium-sized enterprise to a large corporation?

philwelch• 17 years ago

It's not a new concept. Look up Kelly Johnson and the Lockheed Skunk Works.

bliving• 17 years ago

And the Macintosh project at Apple; complete with pirate flags!

ramchip• 17 years ago

And, IMHO even more importantly, Semco.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ricardo_Semler

roc2• 17 years ago

If you can sufficiently insulate a group from the corporation in general, sure, you can do better than corporate mediocrity. For a while. But that's harder and harder to do. Particularly for decent stretches of time.

Consider: it would be in the best interest of any project manager to steer their project away from the Black Team. They aren't incentivized to ship good software, but to ship on schedule. And should avoidance be impossible, they absolutely will point corporate HR at any and every aspect of that strong team, to break-up, slow-down or demoralize them.

Similarly, with higher-up management. They'll need certain projects to be treated with kid gloves. So they'll scheme and conspire to either defeat the team and ruin its effectiveness or defeat the process, so that the team's effectiveness is rendered moot.

It's the perverted reward structure in large corporations that causes most of their problems. There's no lack of people trying to fix those problems. But any solution (including this one) will ultimately be defeated so long as that reward structure remains.

nostrademons2• 17 years ago

Big businesses often avoid that by giving separate profit & loss responsibility to each division. That way, each individual group competes on the marketplace, and incompetent groups can't hide by breaking up competent ones.

It's an open question how to adapt this to "infrastructure" groups that are shared by the whole organization, which may explain why there're so many horror stories about corporate IT and HR. I guess technically QA is also an infrastructure group, so it's surprising the Black Team survived for so long, but I guess the improvements they made were visible enough that they had senior management's protection.

pasbesoin• 17 years ago

One problem is when external forces bring in incompetent management. Being part of such a team may be a great experience, but you are always at the mercy of higher ups. Your one real point of leverage is to walk out the door. If the people managing you don't respect what you bring to the table, you lose even this. And if they don't understand it, which is what often happens with "interchangeable" management, they are unlikely to respect it. Then, reflect that there is the potential for this disconnect at each level of management. Start counting the levels that exist in your organization.

If you are smart, you will develop an informal network of contacts/relationships throughout your organization. And keep your resume up to date. (I think that smart people develop such a network not only or even primarily out of a calculated decision to manage their career, but because they find interesting what other people know and do and struggle with and solve, and helping them.)

Perhaps this is one reason social skills (of a certain sort) tend to predominate in large organizations. Given the situation, they become the most essential tools to a career.

Also, regarding social equanimity, a large part of corporate life is "not rocking the boat". At lower ranks, this can imply a strong uniformity of treatment. Your increase will be between 0% and 4%, regardless, because those are the absolute limits that have been chosen. If someone were to receive 10%, there would be a lot of jealousy and unrest. The only way to larger increases is promotion. Promotion changes one's duties. Ergo, certain duties will never be compensated beyond "industry standards". The social structure caps their compensation and so, minus the individual who 'self-sacrifices', their effectiveness.

And this is, in part, where your "average or below-average" coworkers come from. Management won't sweeten the pot, even if, as the posted story implies, going after the top of the talent pool produces far greater returns than the additional investment.

I guess this comment is kind of thrown together. Large social structures tend to enforce norms and drift towards a lowest common denominator. Exceptions occur, but over time, they are fighting the tide.

lallysingh• 17 years ago

I've had some good managers and some bad ones. The difference for me has been whether they add-to or reduce my set of concerns.

A bad one will make you aware of every microissue their boss has to worry about, and makes you code in some terrible things in order to please them.

A good one acts as a firewall between their boss and their subordinates. Bad ideas from above are pushed back (as much as they can), lots of independent (and usually fairly random) requirements are combined into something logical, and my resulting problem set is something reasonable to create, test, and maintain.

A boss with programming experience will be able to negotiate a deliverable that's internally consistent enough to make for a good product. They do some of the up-front thinking to reduce the problem down before it's even given to me.

A nontechnical boss just sees a spreadsheet of checkboxes that we have to complete. They're like a simple IO controller: send requests, wait for completion.

arockwell• 17 years ago

I think the important part is to allow these groups to be self-selecting. In other words, the smartest people should gravitate towards each other if they are allowed to. For a really interesting take on how to do this take a look at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WL_Gore_and_Associates#Gore_Cul...

I couldn't find a good source for how many employees they have, but its in the thousands, so they have been able to make this work on a large scale.

tom_b• 17 years ago

It's a mistake to think that corporate mediocrity follows from employee mediocrity. On the contrary, a significant amount of bad software is made to work by the efforts of a large number of rather smart people.

A more nuanced view might focus on how corporate culture, a short term focus on sales due to stock market pressures, and the inevitable lack of accountability that seems to shield the management chain from harm provided they continue to take no risks around innovation combine to create some weird effects. Look in particular at how some big software providers make acquisitions, which are then polished and re-branded as a new version solution and then shoved into a customer pipeline.

These customer pipelines are the real magic - no matter what junk gets shoved down them, nine times out of ten, junk gets paid for. Nobody on either side cares. Takes too much personal risk in the big corporate world to point out that the emperor wears no clothes.

Growing small teams of highly competent people seems to naturally lead to duplicated effort and turf wars as well. Don't think that a team of magic snowflakes will outshine all the "drips" hanging on . . . I've spent too much time in big corporate IT to not realize that most people walking the halls in these places are damn smart. They're just hamstrung by the corporate structure. But - this is why small startups have an advantage. They're not nailed down by convention.

thaumaturgy• 17 years ago

Did you read the same article I did?

This had little to do with competence! The team was successful because it grouped together some people who actually enjoyed their job. Individually, they were only slightly better at it than their peers; as a group of "like-minded individuals" (quoted from the article), they spent much more energy collaborating on ways to improve their software testing process.

"Like-minded" is only tangentially related to intelligence or competence or any of the other traits that arrogant people like to ascribe to themselves. It's really about people that have similar priorities and styles and work well together.

raheemm3• 17 years ago

Its pitiful that building bug-free software is considered legendary. Speaks volumes about our industry.

alexgartrell• 17 years ago

Systems got orders of magnitude more complicated, time to release got orders of magniture shorter, and everything got a whole hell of a lot better.

btilly2• 17 years ago

I agree with 2 of your points, but the third makes me wonder whether you work in the same industry that I do.

raheemm3• 17 years ago

You could make the same arguments in every industry that exists, somehow software is the only one that gets away with it. Even our counterparts in hardware are held to a higher standard.

Djikstra and Hoare are the only ones who tried to advance a higher standard and yet beyond naming an award for one and singing praises of the other, the field has continued to accept lesser standards.

rayvega• 17 years ago

Timeless. Not just that this happened in the 60's, but I didn't notice the publish date (2002) of the post itself until after reading it.

wouterinho• 17 years ago

"Some individuals even grew long mustaches which they would twirl with melodramatic flair as they savaged a programmer's code."

Love it!

alexandros• 17 years ago

I think a crucial reason this worked is that there was a measurable objective, the value of which was universally understandable. Find software bugs. This is how they measured and selected the initial team, and this is how the team itself could prove its effectiveness in a management-compatible, objective manner and therefore defend its existence. Finding other areas where this could work is an interesting excercise.

tcskeptic• 17 years ago

I agree that measurability is important, but there are plenty of measurable objectives that don't inspire this sort of espirit de corp exhibitted here. I would love to know more about the leadership of this group, and if the leadership of the group fostered this sort of group identification. Is there a leadership lesson here, or did this emerge organically?

willwagner• 17 years ago

Having worked in similar environments in the early 90's on desktop software, there are some serious downsides to this approach.

Basically, it can lead to having a rift between developers and QA, and in a big corporation, it can become a bureaucratic mess and a 'us' vs. 'them' attitude between groups. I've been in long heated meetings between QA and Dev arguing over individual bugs, not so much on behalf of the customer as opposed to face-saving exercise.

From the article: "And the things they did to software went beyond all bounds of rational use testing and were more akin to software torture." In a perfect world with unlimited time, it's great to find bugs through contortions but usually there is some costs associated with it either with QA not focused on other areas that matter, or having a developer focused on confirming that bug as opposed to working on something else.

Sometimes it's great in a bigger organization to have a unique culture so I agree with the jist of the article and to other HN comments. For instance, I worked at a company on a smaller Macintosh team that fostered a healthy competition with the much bigger Windows team which worked well. I'm just not so sure it works well when people are essentially working on the same project where interfacing with each other is a requirement.

raptorex• 17 years ago

maybe I'm just feeling negative today, but this sounds like some bullshit to me. it sounds like the kind of thing that would be appealing to managers: having "not exceptionally intelligent or talented" employees who become completely obsessed with doing their jobs. great, you can pay them average salaries and they will be so loyal to your giant company. the story and the events themselves are fine, but I feel like the reason this story (and some of these details seem pretty apocryphal to me, like programmers crying because of bug reports) is so popular is that management types are taking the wrong lesson from it: that it would be desirable if employees were unhealthily obsessed with doing their jobs. then they try and manipulate their own people into doing the same thing.

numbchuckskills• 17 years ago

"great, you can pay them average salaries and they will be so loyal to your giant company"

The point is that they become loyal to each other, the company reaping a reward is just a side benefit of people working towards a common goal.

I was on a similar 'elite' skunkworks dev team in a company of ~ 35,000 that had executive support, and the results were insanely good. You can't manipulate people to do this; You can however give them the freedom to make it happen.

potatolicious3• 17 years ago

I've had the opportunity to work on much smaller 'elite' teams before (7-10 people), and if I didn't have to eat and pay rent I'd do it for free.

The amount of productivity, support, and "you grok me"-ness is so extreme that it's really a wonder to behold. As a regular dev now I really do look back on those days and wish I can do it all over again.

colbyolson• 17 years ago

"Pictures or it didn't happen!"

Edit: I tried searching for anything related to IBM and their Black Team. It seems Google saturates my search request with everything linking back to this article.

Perhaps someone could help?

nomoresecrets• 17 years ago

As mentioned already, the book Peopleware has a section the Black Team, which predates this article by quite a few years.

mtrichardson• 17 years ago

I really, really hope that the team that's in charge of Apple's app review process doesn't start emulating these guys, with legal things instead of technical things. Though it seems like they kind of already have.

IBM's infamous "Black Team" (2002)

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