If you are part of a team that can be productive, remotely, then you are very lucky.
I am not. We are in trouble as a tech business and have a very large piece of tech debt that we need to get over, this year. (We also have an amazing product and smart people invested in our growth. It’s one of those good problems to have, but it’s still a problem.)
We experimented (a long time ago, before I joined) with an “open source model” of siloed teams who made internal releases to each other. This had the unfortunate side effect of hampering our release process and also, far worse, embedding a really unproductive them-vs-us culture that holds back our ability to ship on time.
On a technical level, it’s kind of like the bad old days of when people all had their own branches, and all tried to merge at once in the week of the release. If you’re familiar with this anti-pattern then we are in a similar situation but with individual repositories instead of branches.
Our team has a lot of veterans, many with the title architect, and all of whom are emotionally invested in the status quo being the right approach. There’s a lot of friction between us. Frankly this might not be the right team for me in the long run, but there are so many awesome people here as well that I want to make it work.
We objectively have a problem shipping our product, and because most of the old guard work remotely it is nigh on impossible to effectively build consensus around making any kind of big change. It is very a hard ship sail.
The saving grace? My manager and I go in three days a week. So does our VP Eng and the manager and tech lead of a couple of other important teams. We have whiteboard diagrams, 1:1 walks in the park, and chats in the kitchen. When we meet with the old guard, we sit together in a meeting room while they are on individual calls. I feel like we are getting somewhere, slowly, but an unsettling amount of time has been spent on how to effectively do staff-level persuasive tech-leadership, in the face of a highly talented but highly conservative cadre of senior engineers who keep themselves at arm’s length over Zoom.
It sounds more like the team is rather inexperienced for that kind of work environment.
Communication, the overarching priorities and alignment are super important. I work for a German insurance company and we rolled out crazy amounts of stuff over the last two years and started a re-org that is actually going well.
Also, emotional investment can be quite problematic. All the teams need to work on the overall goal. Having people fixated on their golden toy is a good way to crash into a hard wall.
I don't know this but it sounds to me like a typical case where the senior engineers are the ones who really know how things work and they are also the ones doing the actual coding (which is probably why they prefer to work from home since it's much more productive). Then there's a bunch of manager types who only talk and write powerpoints who have a bunch of ideas that are divorced from reality. But they imagine that the people-actually-doing-the-work are the problem.
I honestly think almost everyone should be required to code themselves, at least part time. That would clear out the parasitic office-politics talkers and bring power back where it belongs: to the people who actually know something, but don't have time for scheming because they actually work.
> “bad old days of when people all had their own branches”
I’m sort-of-an-SRE at a large enterprise and I see many developers gravitate towards this pattern. There’s a Dev1 branch for the first developer and a Dev2 for the second, etc…
And as you said, a huge merge the day before production rollout.
I’m trying to steer them in the right direction but it’s hard to find a good source that covers everything.
E.g.: this this the bad way, here’s how it goes wrong, this is the good way, this is how it fixes it.
Sounds like a lot of cultural issues. My pre-covid job was a very small company but similar stuff.
We hired an in-town workforce and cut the old guard out completely. Worked in person everyday until lockdown but had flexibility as well.
We were all pretty close (10ish people including execs) so remote work was fine and we shut down the office… I’m a much bigger remote work fan now because of how well it went.
The people on the same page will be on the same page whether they’re waking through the park or not. It may be time for the others to move along.
I am not. We are in trouble as a tech business and have a very large piece of tech debt that we need to get over, this year. (We also have an amazing product and smart people invested in our growth. It’s one of those good problems to have, but it’s still a problem.)
We experimented (a long time ago, before I joined) with an “open source model” of siloed teams who made internal releases to each other. This had the unfortunate side effect of hampering our release process and also, far worse, embedding a really unproductive them-vs-us culture that holds back our ability to ship on time.
On a technical level, it’s kind of like the bad old days of when people all had their own branches, and all tried to merge at once in the week of the release. If you’re familiar with this anti-pattern then we are in a similar situation but with individual repositories instead of branches.
Our team has a lot of veterans, many with the title architect, and all of whom are emotionally invested in the status quo being the right approach. There’s a lot of friction between us. Frankly this might not be the right team for me in the long run, but there are so many awesome people here as well that I want to make it work.
We objectively have a problem shipping our product, and because most of the old guard work remotely it is nigh on impossible to effectively build consensus around making any kind of big change. It is very a hard ship sail.
The saving grace? My manager and I go in three days a week. So does our VP Eng and the manager and tech lead of a couple of other important teams. We have whiteboard diagrams, 1:1 walks in the park, and chats in the kitchen. When we meet with the old guard, we sit together in a meeting room while they are on individual calls. I feel like we are getting somewhere, slowly, but an unsettling amount of time has been spent on how to effectively do staff-level persuasive tech-leadership, in the face of a highly talented but highly conservative cadre of senior engineers who keep themselves at arm’s length over Zoom.