jonathan@researchcomputingteams.org
This resource first appeared in issue #68 on 02 Apr 2021 and has tags Technical Leadership: Other
The resilience of mixed seniority engineering teams - Tito Sarrionandia
An ongoing if unintended theme of the newsletter is that when managing teams, many useful things - like everything involved in having the team move to distributed work-from-home, giving feedback, having quarterly goal-setting - come down to making things more explicit. That requires a lot of up front work, more documentation, change of processes, and a little more discomfort for the manager initially - but then make a lot of other things better and easier for everyone.
Sarrionandia talks in this short article about the advantage of having teams with a range of seniority in exactly this light. Having junior staff on the team means that more resources have to be dedicated initially to explaining how things work, documenting processes and tools, etc. But those steps of making things more explicit make things work better for everyone. It makes it easier to bring new people onto the project, junior or senior. Those now explicit steps can be put into playbooks or automation scripts (or conference talks, or papers). More work initially, but that work pays off.
