The Bad Apple: Group Poison

@Keppla
So, basically you are saying, that the results (failing or succeeding) do not count (…even if you happen to be right), but only that the team agrees?

No, I don’t say that. What I am saying is that sometimes you don’t need to have a perfect solution in order to succeed. It is better to reach a decision that lets the team move forward than to waste a lot of hours arguing technicalities. So you stop arguing, for the team’s sake.

In the very rare case where 1) a team of professionals are total idiots who are going to fail totally unless they listen to you and 2) they refuse to listen to you, then you should still stop arguing and just quit. For your own sake.

The examples I gave were just examples from Joels article but I still want to respond:

Source control: You use source control because it is effortless and it will save your ass one day. It takes no time at all.

Specs: You write specs because you yourself will want to know what it is you are supposed to do, verify it and make sure it makes sense before you go ahead. You also want to verify your code against it later. You can also show a spec to the PHB and ask him is this what the program should do? and be sure that the pogram is doing just that.

Documentation: You write documentation so that the users know how to use your program, saving you from tons of support calls and also giving the impression that the application is being maintained by someone who cares.

The trick is to stay positive and do the best you can, instead of finding reasons or excuses to NOT do the best you can.

The difference between pessimistic slacker and honest critisism is that the honest critisism will offer an alternative action, not just empty opposition. Let’s do this other thing! instead of What for?

With this in mind, the answer to

Am i a pessimist, a jerk, or a slacker because, or do i just critizize honestly and try to save time?

based on the examples you gave, is in my opinion: Pessimistic slacker.

Another interesting situation is when the good apples are a basket of idiots. Trying to maintain a brave face knowing the ship is sinking doesn’t inspire people who don’t want to patch the leak–thus, failure (or lack of success) can also be attributed to not enough bad apple to push people over the edge into proactivity.

Can you imagine team situations where the jerk/pessimist/slacker causes so much friction, the remaining members become determined to prove him/her wrong? Negativity can also paradoxically be galvanizing, the proverbial boot to the ass

I think I speak for everyone else in the comments, as well as everyone that has read this article, in saying that I am glad that I am not the bad apple and I have many ideas and thoughts on all the teams that I’ve been on that have had bad apples that were not me.

@Keppla I don’t think you are relaxed. It appears you worked with a very slack team, or at least your position in the team degenerated into ‘ignore Bob and stick him in the corner’ syndrome. You sound bitter still despite protests otherwise. Sorry you had to suffer, but there are better teams out there.

Something to consider: Sometimes there’s that person who always wants xyz infrastructure upfront, because without xyz we’ll never finish and it’ll never be any good. Teams often get tired of 'Bob’s and his new flavor of xyz’s every week and someone going in and ruining perfectly good code or process, etc.

Now I’m not saying you’re wrong - let’s not go through that again - but perhaps it’s the way you approach a problem.

You’re in a team so work as a team. What I mean by that is not to use the holier-than-thou attitude or i-told-you-so aloofness, but to show cost/benefit and slowly introduce change. Show that the change is being progressive and not just ramming things down your coworkers throats. Show that there is real value, and if you can’t show the real value, then maybe there isn’t any.

While I agree as professionals we should ask questions and dig into details and ponder the different outcomes. But we should also not suffer from analysis paralysis, and we should also, once a decision’s been made, stick with the decision. Treat all decisions as a team decision.

During the decision making be active. Look at multiple sides of the problem. Dissect things. Once the decision’s been made, whether you like it or not, embrace it. As you say, sometimes you need to let things blow up (hopefully only in dev) before people will notice. This is human nature. Get used to it.

‘Hey Phil, what do you think of X? I was thinking X could do Y and Z and that would make it easier. Mind if I try?’

But see all that doesn’t have anything to do with coding. It’s everything to do with working in a team.

Get the rid of bad apples and you are ready to quit business. Your last employee will be 20 year old student living with his mom.

The sub-prime tummyache was caused by too many good apples.
Anyway that study is hardly exhaustive, typical sociological pseudo science crap.

Well we know who the bad apple is in this bunch.

You know of course that the bad apples never realize they are the bad apples.

Instead it’s always everyone else’s fault so when you say get rid of the bad apples you’re assuming everyone is in agreement on who that is.

This article amazed me… because in base of my experience I can confirm that it’s simply TRUE !!! Imagine if you have on your team both
the ‘Depressive Pessimist’ and the ‘The Jerk’… it’s devastating!!!

I am skeptical about group think in general. Well, there is informatin sharing and the division of labor which are beneficiary to the work process. The influence of the bad apple is what I would more appropriate call realist apple, mainly what are we doing here? and Is the group’s decision necessarily or even in most cases the most wise decision or depends the truth of a proposition not on the number of people supporting it but on a more objective measure?
While I do not doubt the outcome of the experiment in terms of what has been tried to be shown, I remain skeptical about team work in general which is simply a compromise, based on limited time, to come up with a working solution which is mostly pragmatically valid, but not optimal.

Jeff, your conclusion that the worst team member is the best predictor of how any team performs cannot be extrapolated from this study. The study was about the style of behavior that the bad apple exhibited, not that one of them had lesser skills.

What you are saying is that any dev team that has a junior member on it is only as good as the junior member. Nonsense.

There’s tons of research, going back decades, demonstrating that people conform to group values and norms.

But Will found the opposite.

This reminds me a bit of people saying there’s no global warming as it’s been a cold summer in their town. Rejecting tons of research on the basis of one study is hardly scientific.

I would argue that a 45 minute task is nowhere near the time needed to develop true group working. I remember I once had to work with a real pessimist. Initially I would be reluctant to be the one to argue against them, not wanting to rock the boat, but after a while (ie a few meetings) their attitude became tedious and myself and other team members became more confident in contradicting her. It probably even helped cement the team.

Of course, then you have one team member who doesn’t work well with the others, which is a bad thing, but not as destructive to the whole team as this study would imply.

I don’t believe this study holds water, as this is contradicted by the earlier and much more famous study (M. Jackson, J. Jackson, T. Jackson, J. Jackson, M. Jackson) entitled One Bad Apple Don’t Spoil the Whole Bunch, Girl.

Case closed.

But then again, I’m a depressively pessimistic, slacker jerk…

And what about the golden apple or something, what’s the influence of a very talented lider??

Not much coding going on, since everyone seems to be here reading this stupid crap. And, yes, you bad apples do damage. I was working when I received this crap in my work email. Unfortunately, I must reveiw (and action) all emails presented me. So, the effect was that a colleague dragged me from work to review this crap.

Avoid being a bad apple by getting back to work. Or, do us a favor, stay home and out of the way. We’ll send your checks to you and you are allowed to meet and conference amongst yourselves. But, whatever you do, don’t come to or call the office, ever, ever. Luv Ya. Peace.

After reading some of these replies, unless they’re all meant to be ironic, I’m thinking maybe you should add that to your blag.

Of course, then you have one team member who doesn’t work well with the others, which is a bad thing, but not as destructive to the whole team as this study would imply.

Here I was thinking the problem would be lemons!

While listening to that TAL episode, I realized that I had often been the jerk in a small way: I would say sarcastic things that I thought were funny (and didn’t intend to be mean) and that other people laughed at, but the other people probably really didn’t think it was funny.

That is an easy behavior to change, and I think it does make a big difference.

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Its a nice example of herd psychology. But I think the experiment is flawed. Felps has defined only bad apple and assumes all other are good apples. A more appropriate classification would be bad apples, good apples and the herd apples. Good apples are people who are self driven wont get biased by others. Herd apples will just go by what they see in others. Bad apples’ defn will remain the same.

In the case explained in Felps’ experiment, there is a group of herd apples with a bad apple. As the herd is not intrinsically motivated, they get easily biased by a bad apple as explained by him.

But consider a case where there is a group of herd apples with a good apple. The good apple will be positive spirited, extremely motivated and hardworking. This would be the positive extreme of a bad apple.
I think something similar to the previous case would happen.

Generally in a group, majority will be the herd with few good apples and bad apples. And i feel bad apples are very necessary to maintain the social equilibrium in the presence of good apples.

Yes… yes, I do. There’s enough people who have a problem with it now that it’s getting its own (practically unGoogleable) term: WEIRD, for “Western, European, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic”. It’s one of those “elephant in the room” issues, where nobody wants to look at their own research too carefully, just in case their entire academic career turns out to be a load of unrepresentative guff.