For me, it hasn't been an issue, but then I'm very heteronormative (white, cis, etc). With that said, from my perspective it's all about building a culture of trust. You have to create a team where everybody feels that they can speak up, talk about their feelings, ask "stupid" questions without being judged and so on. One key point in this is making sure everybody understands that if someone learns while in the mob, they are contributing to the mob. Mob programming isn't about producing the most lines of code or the greatest quality (even if that is often a perk), it's more about working together toward a common goal.
However, as I touched upon in the post, interpersonal issues will often rise to the surface when doing mob programming. This also means that there is a risk that things like sexism, racism, ableism or any other -isms; no matter if it's unconscious, structural, or whatever, might also rise to the issue. I can't tell you how to handle this if it happens, I haven't experienced it so I can never put myself in this position. What I can tell you is that in my, limited, experience you need to have a focus on working on these things. You can't just start mob programming and hope it's gonna work out, it won't. You need to put the work in to get the benefits. You need to make sure everyone understands that everyone can learn for anyone, that there can't be any prestige in the mob, that the purpose isn't to show whos best but to deliver value to the organization.
And just to repeat myself a bit, I wholeheartedly recommend reading some books by Brené Brown or watching her special on Netflix.
Please let me know if you have any more questions or if something is unclear, I'd love to chat more about this!
Hey! I'm a 🇫🇷👩🏼💻 backend developer who works on Python. Sometimes I do some game dev and tries old languages like BASIC and ASM. I love to learn how things work!
Location
Lille, France
Education
Master - Expert(e) en technologies de l'Information
Thanks for your answer!
I'm happy to see that this Netflix doc is on Netflix France too! I'll take a look at that and the other books, this is super interesting.
I think to talk about all of that before the mob programming, what are the limits and what the objectives and the end could be a good idea to start.
We've started to do something similar yesterday to my job to learn about new tools we want to use in every project and learn also Elixir. ATM, it was only the setup of the project so nothing special, but I let you know what we learned with that and if I have more inputs for these issues.
Hi! This is a great question, thank you!
For me, it hasn't been an issue, but then I'm very heteronormative (white, cis, etc). With that said, from my perspective it's all about building a culture of trust. You have to create a team where everybody feels that they can speak up, talk about their feelings, ask "stupid" questions without being judged and so on. One key point in this is making sure everybody understands that if someone learns while in the mob, they are contributing to the mob. Mob programming isn't about producing the most lines of code or the greatest quality (even if that is often a perk), it's more about working together toward a common goal.
However, as I touched upon in the post, interpersonal issues will often rise to the surface when doing mob programming. This also means that there is a risk that things like sexism, racism, ableism or any other -isms; no matter if it's unconscious, structural, or whatever, might also rise to the issue. I can't tell you how to handle this if it happens, I haven't experienced it so I can never put myself in this position. What I can tell you is that in my, limited, experience you need to have a focus on working on these things. You can't just start mob programming and hope it's gonna work out, it won't. You need to put the work in to get the benefits. You need to make sure everyone understands that everyone can learn for anyone, that there can't be any prestige in the mob, that the purpose isn't to show whos best but to deliver value to the organization.
And just to repeat myself a bit, I wholeheartedly recommend reading some books by Brené Brown or watching her special on Netflix.
Please let me know if you have any more questions or if something is unclear, I'd love to chat more about this!
Thanks for your answer!
I'm happy to see that this Netflix doc is on Netflix France too! I'll take a look at that and the other books, this is super interesting.
I think to talk about all of that before the mob programming, what are the limits and what the objectives and the end could be a good idea to start.
We've started to do something similar yesterday to my job to learn about new tools we want to use in every project and learn also Elixir. ATM, it was only the setup of the project so nothing special, but I let you know what we learned with that and if I have more inputs for these issues.
That sounds great, looking forward to hear how it goes! :)