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> “Before we had four cross functional teams, working on a single application, everyone felt responsible for it, worked overtime to fix bugs etc, we had good co
by mlthoughts2018 8y ago
> “Before we had four cross functional teams, working on a single application, everyone felt responsible for it, worked overtime to fix bugs etc, we had good communication between the teams.”
This actually sounds very dysfunctional, but with the type of positive PR spin that product / executive management wants, basically anyone who believes “cross-functional” is anything more than a buzzword.
Would love to know what the engineers thought about working in that environment (which sounds like a monolithic, too-many-cooks, zero specialization situation likely negatively affecting career growth & routine skill building).
- badfrog 8y agoAside from the working overtime part, what sounds dysfunctional?
- mlthoughts2018 8y agoTypes of bugs or failures are not separated into specialized areas, rather it’s one “cross-functional” unit. It’s like building a monolith class in software instead of following basic principles like Single Responsibility Principle and organizing workflows according to independent specializations. This part is often much worse than the overtime part, because it means you’re expected to sublimate your personal career goals in favor of whatever arbitrary thing needs done for the sake of the cross-functional unit. When I hear someone describe communication between cross-functional team members as “good” or “effective,” then I know it’s a big lie, and most probably it’s a disaster of overcommunication where product managers or non-tech leadership have a stranglehold on decision making when really engineering should be autonomous in these cases exactly according to independent specialization.