This is a fantastic review of the literature, and a very valuable post—thank you!
My critical / constructive note is that I think that many of the conclusions here are state with too much certainty or are overstated. My promary reasons to think it should be more hedged are that the literature is so ambiguous, the fundamental underlying effects are unclear, the model(s) proposed in the post do not really account for reasonable uncertainties about what factors matter, and there is almost certainly heterogeneity based on factors that aren’t discussed.
I’m unclear if you think all conclusions should be hedged like that, or my specific strong conclusions (site visits are good, don’t split a team) are insufficiently supported.
Somewhere in the middle. Most conclusions should be hedged more than they are, but some specific conclusions here are based on strong assumptions that I don’t think are fully justified, and the strength of evidence and the generality of the conclusions isn’t clear.
I think that recommending site visits and not splitting a team are good recommendations in general, but sometimes (rarely) could be unhelpful. Other ideas are contingently useful, but often other factors push the other way. “Make people very accessible” is a reasonable idea that in many contexts would work poorly, especially given Paul Graham’s points on makers versus managers. Similarly, the emphasis on having many channels for communication seems to be better than the typical lack of communication, but can be a bad idea for people who need time for deep work, and could lead to furthering issues with information overload.
All of that said, again, this is really helpful research, and points to enough literature that others can dive in and assess these things for themselves.
That makes sense. Neither of those was my intention- I declare at the beginning that the research is crap; repeating it at every point seems excessive. And I assumed people would take the conclusions as “this will address this specific problem” rather than “this is a Pure Good Action that will have no other consequences.”
I understand that this isn’t how it came across to you, and that’s useful data. I am curious how others feel I did on this score.
This is a fantastic review of the literature, and a very valuable post—thank you!
My critical / constructive note is that I think that many of the conclusions here are state with too much certainty or are overstated. My promary reasons to think it should be more hedged are that the literature is so ambiguous, the fundamental underlying effects are unclear, the model(s) proposed in the post do not really account for reasonable uncertainties about what factors matter, and there is almost certainly heterogeneity based on factors that aren’t discussed.
Thanks for the kind words.
I’m unclear if you think all conclusions should be hedged like that, or my specific strong conclusions (site visits are good, don’t split a team) are insufficiently supported.
Somewhere in the middle. Most conclusions should be hedged more than they are, but some specific conclusions here are based on strong assumptions that I don’t think are fully justified, and the strength of evidence and the generality of the conclusions isn’t clear.
I think that recommending site visits and not splitting a team are good recommendations in general, but sometimes (rarely) could be unhelpful. Other ideas are contingently useful, but often other factors push the other way. “Make people very accessible” is a reasonable idea that in many contexts would work poorly, especially given Paul Graham’s points on makers versus managers. Similarly, the emphasis on having many channels for communication seems to be better than the typical lack of communication, but can be a bad idea for people who need time for deep work, and could lead to furthering issues with information overload.
All of that said, again, this is really helpful research, and points to enough literature that others can dive in and assess these things for themselves.
That makes sense. Neither of those was my intention- I declare at the beginning that the research is crap; repeating it at every point seems excessive. And I assumed people would take the conclusions as “this will address this specific problem” rather than “this is a Pure Good Action that will have no other consequences.”
I understand that this isn’t how it came across to you, and that’s useful data. I am curious how others feel I did on this score.