A few days back I wrote about my experience in a team I‘m working with. In that post I focused on the asymmetry in the team, the resulting challenges and frustration because of the large gap in skills and experience throughout the team. Thinking about the situation a bit more I found other contributing factors to the situation. These factors are more on technical side than the ones I talked before. It‘s about the tools the team has available to it and how these amplify the underlying challenges prosed by the team constellation.
The things I would like to look at today aren‘t specific to the project I talked about. It’s more that the situation in the project caused me to think about them. I‘m going to list some tools and infrastructure that I think is essential to (remote) teams. Of course the topic isn‘t new and lots of people have written about it but I still wanted to share my thoughts on it.
A lens that has become my favorite one over the past year is the Helios 44. It's a 58mm F2 full manual lens and is best known for it swirly bokeh. The lens is based on the Carl Zeiss Jena Biotar 2/58 it's essentially copy/clone of the optical design after the second world war. Since I don't own the Carl Zeiss Jena lens I can't compare them but the Internet says the Carl Zeiss Jena lens generally produces better image quality with better contrast. The Helios is one of the most produced lenses ever. It was produced from 1950 till 1990. I won't write down all its history and the technical details of the lens, if you want to check them out you can find them on camerapedia, vintage camera lenses or the Russian original.
A situation I observed recently in a team I'm working with is a huge spread in seniority through the team members. In my frustration I tweeted one of my observation here. I noticed that estimations for tickets vary vastly which makes planning and estimations a real challenge. This manifests in huge differences in perceived complexity for tasks. The part of the team with lots of seniority estimates tasks much smaller than the more junior part of the team. The gab between those is huge, in some cases tasks take a senior people on the project one to two days while junior, even with lots of supervision and support, will struggle to finish the task in a 3 weeks sprint.
Does that mean the juniors are hurting the team and they shouldn't be part of it? I don't think the answer to this problem is that simple.
