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Danger with this is people recommend based on friendship & personal gain as much as competence. You can end up with mini guilds of ~5 people, who know each oth
by walrus1066 10y ago
Danger with this is people recommend based on friendship & personal gain as much as competence.
You can end up with mini guilds of ~5 people, who know each other well, and help each other with their career by recommending each other as they migrate from company to company.
Seen this happen twice now. At my current company, someone joined the devops/infrastructure team, then brought 4 over from his network at his previous company. Most are competent, but one seriously isn't, and he's protected by his cabal, who now dominate the team. He's a 'senior' engineer to boot!
- matt_wulfeck 10y agoI've seen it happen as well. If you look at each person individually you may have issues, but does the team function? Do they get their work done and stay out of your way? For all I care they can have a dog on their payroll as long as their team does what it's supposed to do and stays out of my way.
- walrus1066 10y agoThe team sort-of functions. But they're stuck in a form of groupthink, where they seem to prefer building their own tools/scripts, our server monitoring is poor/non-existent (only application logs), they are very reluctant to move to AWS, security obsessed to the point of manually setting routes and firewalls manually, very poor automation overall etc etc But because they dominate our devops/infra, it's very hard to penetrate the groupthink, our CTO is thankfully getting involved.