This blog post is all about: a special kind of contract that is almost never written down, comparing rat-race with inspired evangelism or a quest for workplace happiness, what does happen when "social contract" is broken (& why does it happen), why respecting "social contract" (and first - having it at all!) makes such a difference.I've started few series of blog posts - one related to compensation, another to the level of commitment required to achieve the success, but ... I've recently found out that I can't conclude any of those without introducing one important concept (that rarely gets named…
All posts in Teamwork
This blog post is all about: the Mother of All Rules; consciousness of assholes; why being an asshole with almost 100% certainty eliminates the possibility of building up sustainable, high-performing team; what's the problem with sarcasm (& how easily it can be solved); How not to be an asshole (it ain't that hard, really ...) Each week I'm trying to share some thoughts & frequently even make some advice to you: about architecture, leadership, technology, management & what not. And still, until this very day I didn't mention THAT. The most important advice. The most valuable rule. The mother of all…
In this blog post I'll describe why remote work != remote work, what's wrong about satellites and isles, why differences in communication bandwidth are worse than overall low bandwidth and what does it have in common with osmosis & water cooler.No, I'm not going to describe pros & cons of a remote work in depth. This is well covered in many sources & in a way I couldn't have matched in a blog post (or even series). My intention is to address a very simple & well isolated issue: plenty of people, encouraged by some commonly known successful examples of…
This blog post is all about: cognitive bias (one particular one), how quickly we get used to "the new normal", how being insatiable when it comes to knowledge can make us ashamed, why we get annoyed when some junior pops up with "microservices now!" idea, why leader in the trenches may help (& what does it really mean).Habit of fooling ourselvesYou've heard/read about cognitive bias, didn't you? If not, you should definitely read up - there's zillion of resources on them available on-line, e.g.:http://www.visualcapitalist.com/every-single-cognitive-bias/https://betterhumans.coach.me/cognitive-bias-cheat-sheet-55a472476b18https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/…
TL;DR Even today, many treat leading teams as a modern form of livestock herding. Limit the information (to avoid distraction), assign tasks, make a checkpoint each week, force controlled crunch before deadline, rinse & repeat. Fortunately, we can do so much better than that, if we manage to break some basic mental barriers - first: leading can (& should) out-scale; second: leading doesn't have to take ownership from team members; third: leadership is about communication (hence: understanding), credibility (hence: trust) & initiative (hence: driving actions). There are some topics that never stop popping up: even if in different contexts,…
TL;DR If you see that teams "reject" the (part of) codebase, working with it lowers their engagement level, they have neither energy nor will to tackle its challenges, it's very rarely the matter of codebase's size. Sober-minded engineers just do not want to have anything to do with crappy code, especially if they don't feel responsible for its "crappiness". What they need is not their nametags pinned to particular mounds of dung, but a viable, credible & feasible strategy to dispose it. Code ownership problem is almost as old as teaming in software engineering. At…
Have you ever met a Bottleneck Superhero (BS)? I guess you can't tell as the term doesn't tell you anything. No surprise as I've just coined it for the sake of this blog post :> Yes, people who know me in person do know how I like naming things (or people) ;) Hero of the (every) day Ok, let's start with the description of such a "role model". Imagine a person (in a company / team / project) who: has got the most knowledge / experience (relevant to the overall context) or just the "broadest" perspective (his/her knowledge is…
Once in a while I try to catch up on some classics I've somehow omitted to read. One of them is (was) Lencioni's "The Five Dysfunctions of a Team". Title may cause setting some wrong expectations, subtitle is crucial here - "A Leadership Fable". Why so? It's written from executive's perspective & its intended audience is mainly executives (of various levels). Don't flee just yet, I'm not going to review it here :) but there's one particular observation / remark I've found particularly interesting, so I've decided to turn it into a blog post. Straddled At some point,…