I think that what they accomplished is amazing, but remember that their goals were very different than your typical business. Their goals were to create something in a short amount of time with a really random group of people given a fairly short lifetime. The individual projects will live on, but the whole thing was shut down at the end of the campaign.
A business is about sustainability. You are creating things that you will be maintaining and using for (hopefully) years to come. You get to be picky about who you are hiring. In that given, its not unusual that you want all of your employees to be able to work on various parts of the stack as focus changes or what not.
This isn't to discount the value in polyglot groups. Its almost an inevitability at this point. While totally possible that you could have entirely js stack in node, more likely you'll have ruby (or something) and javascript and maybe objc for iphone and java for android and maybe .Net for windows or more objc on osx or whatever.
> In that given, its not unusual that you want all of your employees to be able to work on various parts of the stack as focus changes or what not.
Isn't it? I'm a frontend dev. While I'm capable of digging into the backend and mucking around, it's not a typical part of my job. There are backend devs who I can talk to, who are writing Scala or Java rather than Javascript or Ruby, who can deal with problems faster and better than I could.
Changes of focus like what you describe seem to be typical of far more nascent companies. In that sense, Reed's team was like a startup: everyone had to be ultra-capable because they had to pick up anyone's slack at any time, just like a CEO of a ten-man group sometimes has to clean the kitchen or code a component that no one else has time to.
I think there is a difference in terms of having fullstack developers versus polyglot developers or a polyglot team. To me, and it seems like in this article, polyglot means using various comparable languages that operate at the same or overlapping parts of the stack - so not Ruby versus Node.js, but Ruby versus PHP.
It seems more likely that this was an Obama campaign advantage, rather than a Democratic party advantage.
The translation over isn't obvious. From what I've heard their internal organization was pretty fluid. That kind of thing depends on the quality of people involved, their commonality of purpose, and the organizational culture. You can't box that and roll it over to party HQ.
That said, Democrats do seem more likely to attract and motivate the kind of people you'd need for this. That's a pretty important head start.
If, as the theory goes, the product structure mimics the organizational structure of the group that created the product - you could extend to situations like this. In which case, you would argue that until the GOP changes its (hierarchical and paternalistic) structure the tech advantage will continue.
In the sense of "the democratic party is using technology to their advantage" or "the democratic party is moving the tech industry into their political machine"?
> 4Gb/s, 10k requests per second, 2,000 nodes, 3 datacenters, 180TB and 8.5 billion requests. Design, deploy, dismantle in 583 days to elect the President. #madops – Scott VanDenPlas, Obama for America IT team
That's impressive. Glad that tech is on the Democratic side.
But then again change, liberalism, progress, technology and innovation are all leftist tenets - so it isn't so surprising.
Here's hoping to another tech assisted Republican defeat in 2016. May the morons stay out of power - least they screw us all once again.
[+] [-] theevocater|13 years ago|reply
A business is about sustainability. You are creating things that you will be maintaining and using for (hopefully) years to come. You get to be picky about who you are hiring. In that given, its not unusual that you want all of your employees to be able to work on various parts of the stack as focus changes or what not.
This isn't to discount the value in polyglot groups. Its almost an inevitability at this point. While totally possible that you could have entirely js stack in node, more likely you'll have ruby (or something) and javascript and maybe objc for iphone and java for android and maybe .Net for windows or more objc on osx or whatever.
[+] [-] saraid216|13 years ago|reply
Isn't it? I'm a frontend dev. While I'm capable of digging into the backend and mucking around, it's not a typical part of my job. There are backend devs who I can talk to, who are writing Scala or Java rather than Javascript or Ruby, who can deal with problems faster and better than I could.
Changes of focus like what you describe seem to be typical of far more nascent companies. In that sense, Reed's team was like a startup: everyone had to be ultra-capable because they had to pick up anyone's slack at any time, just like a CEO of a ten-man group sometimes has to clean the kitchen or code a component that no one else has time to.
[+] [-] jordo37|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ckluis|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] chernevik|13 years ago|reply
The translation over isn't obvious. From what I've heard their internal organization was pretty fluid. That kind of thing depends on the quality of people involved, their commonality of purpose, and the organizational culture. You can't box that and roll it over to party HQ.
That said, Democrats do seem more likely to attract and motivate the kind of people you'd need for this. That's a pretty important head start.
[+] [-] malachismith|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bcoates|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] revoltingx|13 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] Roybatty|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] confluence|13 years ago|reply
That's impressive. Glad that tech is on the Democratic side.
But then again change, liberalism, progress, technology and innovation are all leftist tenets - so it isn't so surprising.
Here's hoping to another tech assisted Republican defeat in 2016. May the morons stay out of power - least they screw us all once again.