24

I manage a team of engineers.

Toxic Culture Post #2:

Manager: Everybody on your team needs their own swimlane in Jira. Each person's work should be their own lane. When I have a ticket for <Project A> I want to make sure that <Bob> always gets it, all tickets for <Project B> must go to <James>. You'll need to figure out which team member will handle <New Project C> and create their personal swim lane.

Me: That's not really how SCRUM works. Actually, that's not how teamwork works. You're creating silos and we all need to learn how to do these tasks. We're a cross-functional team, and each team member brings their own unique talents to the whole process.

Manager: So you'll create the swimlanes?

Me: No

Manager (to Bob): You'll be devoted to <Project A> from now own. It's the only work I expect you to do. All work for that project will be yours.

Likewise, my manager also reached out to each team member and assigned them specific tasks, furthering the silos.

Comments
  • 11
    If I may suggest, tell your managers manager thst they are undermining you and costing the company money in terms of maintainability. Sad when egos go before practicality
  • 13
    Multiple attempts at mediating have failed here. Exiting gracefully seems like my best bet at this point.
  • 13
    What will happen when Devs take a few days off?
    Or... hand in their resignation bc of burnout and boredom?

    Death spiral managment.
  • 3
    Nothing wrong with having teams dedicated to their projects. But when your teams have a size of one, that is like having now backups for your most important data.

    Small companies often have that by necessity as they often only have one dev to do all the coding (and often also the IT administration) work.

    For companies having more than one dev i would only think about having project-specific teams when that team would have at least three people.
  • 1
    Manager: Finally some accountability
  • 0
    Oh no no no....

    Our JIRA is basically: Triage, grooming, ready for dev, doing, ready for qa, ready for pm review, ready for deployment, done.

    We all triage together on standup the whole 14 person team. We all groom together on zoom (remotely). We grab cards from ready for dev and move them to doing as we see fit (the devs grab them) we typically grab what we're most comfortable with, but we all do everything.

    When done, the same devs cross QA it (a different dev than the one that did the work), and when QA Approved, it goes to ready for PM etc then PM reviewed.

    There's an agile back and forth process the whole way, changes can happen in QA review or PM Review.

    Zero Micro Managing.
Add Comment