How to Build Toxic Software Teams

Re:How to Build Toxic Software Teams by dxdenton on Wednesday July 26, 2023 @04:29PM (#36884498)

If said teammate decides to follow through on his idea without your explicit permission, transfer him to another team ASAP (without his approval). No teammate can show initiative, self-direction, or autonomy. Furthermore, every piece of work must be represented in JIRA and every team member must report on it —- daily.

This happened to me recently. Yes, I’m a little salty about it. Although it’s probably for the better, as this guy is no longer my manager. For the record, my super-great-idea was upgrading some 5+ year old software that was giving us and the devs a lot of headaches. I was told it could not be done, and it would be replaced by The Next Great Thing, which would take 6-8 months of engineering. I upgraded the thing in a day (in dev) just to prove that it could be done. Despite praises from my teammates (and devs) I had undermined The Manager. Although I know he wanted to, he could not berate or yell or force me to rollback —- imagine telling dev we are rolling back to a five year old version. In any case, ten years in and I’ve learned that the manager is a hard cap on the productivity of a team. The most productive team I’ve been on did not have a manager. We didn’t need a JIRA board or a roadmap or someone to help us plan or prioritize. We simply got our work done. Imagine that.

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Re:How to Build Toxic Software Teams by jcon321 on Wednesday July 26, 2023 @04:58PM (#36884927)

In reality I know what you mean, but not a good look for you imo. Imagine that upgrade causes an issue upstream and someone has to explain who approved it. There's always a way to get housekeeping items approved, sneaking it in isn't it.

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Re:How to Build Toxic Software Teams by peteradio on Wednesday July 26, 2023 @05:21PM (#36885229)

It was in dev environment which I doubt in his world required any sort of management approval.

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Re:How to Build Toxic Software Teams by dxdenton on Wednesday July 26, 2023 @10:03PM (#36887957)

I agree, it was a calculated risk. Without getting into the deets I was confident it wouldn’t introduce any major issues. In fact NOT upgrading had resulted in problems that affected production a few weeks prior. Would I recommend a junior engineer yolo it? Of course not. But I’d also warn junior engineers to always keep a healthy skepticism when they are told “No, this cannot be done.”

> There’s always a way to get housekeeping items approved…

Yes, at a functional software shop, upgrades and maintenance are not considered stretch items. I did my best to make the case from a technical (bug fixes and features), business (vendor X won’t support us on this version), and customer (customer wouldn’t be happy if they knew we were running version X) standpoint. However, at a dysfunctional software shop, none of those factors matter (or they don’t matter as much).

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Re:How to Build Toxic Software Teams by jcon321 on Thursday July 27, 2023 @03:45PM (#36899113)

> I did my best to make the case from a technical (bug fixes and features), business (vendor X won’t support us on this version), and customer (customer wouldn’t be happy if they knew we were running version X) standpoint.

I feel your pain then.

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Re:How to Build Toxic Software Teams by peteradio on Wednesday July 26, 2023 @05:19PM (#36885198)

> We simply got our work done. Imagine that.

Well what happened? Why did you leave? It sounds great!

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Re:How to Build Toxic Software Teams by dxdenton on Wednesday July 26, 2023 @09:23PM (#36887657)

We were assigned a manager. Who immediately tried to bring in his folks from a prior job (they weren’t a good fit), force us to adopt his preferred tools (with no consideration for our skills and tech stack investment), and took over daily standup, which exceeded 30 minutes in the regular for a four person team.

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Re:How to Build Toxic Software Teams by robertlagrant on Wednesday July 26, 2023 @05:36PM (#36885413)

> We didn’t need a JIRA board or a roadmap or someone to help us plan or prioritize. We simply got our work done. Imagine that.

How did you prioritise?

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Re:How to Build Toxic Software Teams by dxdenton on Wednesday July 26, 2023 @09:27PM (#36887686)

When there is a lot to do and you are understaffed the highest priority things are usually obvious. For instance, we keep getting repeated requests for X from dev, let’s automate it or make it self-service. Software X is severely out of date and preventing us (or dev) from implementing X, let’s upgrade it.

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Re:How to Build Toxic Software Teams by robertlagrant on Thursday July 27, 2023 @05:01AM (#36890833)

Ah, gotcha. Single internal customer. Makes sense you wouldn't need much structure around this.

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Re:How to Build Toxic Software Teams by tayo42 on Wednesday July 26, 2023 @07:53PM (#36886827)

> The most productive team I’ve been on did not have a manager.

Ive been in the weird scenario of not having a real manager a couple times. One time it was how you described. Another was pretty bad, we basically became the dumping ground for unwanted projects and tedious work because we didn't have authority to say no.

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Re:How to Build Toxic Software Teams by dxdenton on Wednesday July 26, 2023 @10:11PM (#36888013)

Yes, a good manager shields the team from distractions and lets them focus. I know I sound anti-mgr but I’m not. I’ve had some rly good one who gave us autonomy, trusted us, but also held us accountable. It seems most managers don’t subscribe to the servant leadership philosophy, but are prone to the dictator style (ie team members are subordinates whose role is to implement the (not shared) vision.

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