Gerald McBoing Boing Sound Book

Seibel: You also were managing all these people? Or were you a technical architect with someone else managing the group? Allen: No, I was the research manager for the group. There were about 10 or 12 core people and we divided the work up so that each person really had ownership of a piece of it. Seibel: People have been debating at least since Gerald WeinbergБЂ™s book The Psychology of Computer Programming whether itБЂ™s better for people to БЂњownБЂ«code, so they take responsibility for it, or to have people work more collaboratively so you avoid having silos that only one person understands. It sounds like you thought dividing up the ownership was the way to go? Allen: We worked collaboratively, but the collaboration was about the state of the system, of the implementation. And some people were very good at the implementation, and so theyБЂ™d own a pieceБЂ”some piece of the optimizer or the intra-procedural analysis was definitely one or two people. But also, there were a number of people that were doing a lot of the theory work, or the abstract work of writing the papers, and writing a lot of the papers and algorithms ...»