February 12, 2024 at 12:00 am
Comments posted to this topic are about the item Un-Stable Teams
February 12, 2024 at 9:17 am
I find that there is the feeling of having to start from scratch when joining a new team. It's uncomfortable but a spur to up your game until you bed in. It's tough love; good for me though.
With the experience I have now I feel that long lived teams tend to get a rather insular view of the organisation. They danger is they settle into a fixed mindset, not looking for new ideas, tools, processes etc. In extreme cases they can actively resist trying new ideas. Not every new idea is a good one.
I'm in my final decade of employment and worry about becoming out-of-date. Like it or not, people make judgements on older employees, including their suitability when they apply for new roles. I'd rather my career remained under my control rather than wafting on the whims of others
February 12, 2024 at 3:26 pm
Wow...just WOW. This one almost gave me nightmares. My crazy brain goes into all sorts of imaginary scenarios. In one of my situations this could have spelled disaster in a number of ways. For eleven years I managed a shop where we had Teamsters union and non-union employees. My five union employees worked staggered shifts where functions were different based on the clock and coordination with other departments. And overtime had to be offered by seniority and not by ability or work schedule. What if I had folks with different skills who want to switch functions? What if I have to say NO to folks of different racial background and get charged with discrimination? What if I allow a switch, then have to have one employee spend undue amounts of time supporting the person they switch with? What if a union employee and non-union employee wanted to switch functions? Could this lead to more charges and even further unionization? We did in fact have a nearby community college where employees could take technical courses to develop new skills, but fortunately I never had to handle that situation.
But of course there were days I would gladly have relinquished my management responsibilities to anyone, qualified or not!
OK, I must be losing it.
Rick
Disaster Recovery = Backup ( Backup ( Your Backup ) )
February 12, 2024 at 4:38 pm
I have never read, seen, or heard of anything like this, until I read it here. I don't know what to think about this. In my previous job the IT department was only a couple of people, with me being one of them. It would have been impossible to do what you've described, Steve.
In my current position the IT group is much larger. Close to 200, so it is feasible. But I don't see what you've described ever happening here. Too much inertia to allow for that kind of change.
I'm pretty sure that in my community no company does what you've described, so I cannot experience that here. Perhaps, if I can get a new position working for some company remotely, then I'd actually have a chance to experience what you've described. But it would take that, before I would ever be able to experience it.
Kindest Regards, Rod Connect with me on LinkedIn.
February 13, 2024 at 3:30 pm
I like this idea in theory, but it could cause a bit of drag in practice due to people having to re-skill. At my current employer, I started as a COBOL programmer and rapidly moved onto supporting old VB6 applications and developing new C# ones. After a while, the company decided it wanted a data warehouse and I moved onto the team to build it due to having some previous experience of SQL Server. I've stayed in that arena for the last 10 years or so with very occasional switches back to C# development. Each time, I become aware of how much the C#/.NET platform has moved on in my absence; in terms of technical expertise, I'd be about junior programmer level now - albeit with the advantage of knowing the business and having a lot of general development experience.
February 14, 2024 at 4:57 pm
Re-skilling is always a concern, as is finding people with older skills.
A long-term stable team, can be good, but as noted, can be insular. They also might have fallen behind in some areas, though I think many good people re-gain skills quickly.
The un-stable team isn't one that changes constantly, but evolves. We see about 25-33% of people moving each year, and often in teams of 5-6, I think it's 1-2 changes each year, so it is slow change.
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