![Cover image for Things Strong Developers Do That Drive Their Team Crazy](https://media.dev.to/cdn-cgi/image/width=1000,height=420,fit=cover,gravity=auto,format=auto/https%3A%2F%2Fdev-to-uploads.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fuploads%2Farticles%2Fkgk87re6sje8r1totb79.png)
After years of nose-to-keyboard and countless nights of hairpulling, debugging... you've unlocked a level of ultra-learning you couldn't have imagi...
For further actions, you may consider blocking this person and/or reporting abuse
Helpful stuff. I also often lack the patience or desire to explain why this way or that way.
I really like working with a strong team, when cool ideas come from many sides during brainstorming. When you just started to explain something, and they already understand what you mean and only look at the way to solve minor issues.
The opposite of a weak team. When you share an idea and there are a lot of questions like "what is a proxy", instead of questions about your idea. Few people understand what you are talking about. No ideas or indications of your miscalculations. It gets boring quickly... So far I have not been able to find for myself what to do with it, except to leave such a team or silently do my job as described in the article.
Re: Asking of basic questions. I really try to make it clear to a team that there are no stupid questions. Granted, there's an expected amount of self-help that's expected at work (Googling/reading dev.to or Stack Overflow) in order to be asking more productive questions. I've worked in some environments where no one would ask any questions in the #dev channel, and this seemed give me an impression there was either a fear-of-looking-dumb, or an unhelpful engineering culture at work.
Thanks for your comment btw, looking forward to hear more on your reflections!
Here I completely agree with you, the absence of questions is much worse. I'm not talking about stupid questions. And there is no problem if people ask questions during the presentation that are only indirectly related to it. But it's very different when you're doing brainstorming. This is not a place where you explain to people about different technologies or patterns for several hours, this is a place where you would like to hear different ideas for solving a particular challenge.
But what to do if this happens like this:
On the one hand, this meeting did not give anything significant. On the other hand, the team feels part of the solution (maybe), and this is also the result. But I would like more, I would like to get advice. To understand what are the pros and cons of this solution. And I would like that someone looks at the idea from a different angle.
Any ideas what can be changed in this case?
I get what you mean re: a team that doesn't have strong critical or deep independent thinking, nor answer with much gusto for solutioning, makes me feel unsure and scared... I wonder if it means we have the responsibility to nurture each person's instinct for learning the basics and deepening their craft, or that we need to take less of an open model of consult-and-decide ...
it's correct, and which option is right? :)
There's no "right" I don't think, and every approach I've taken with others was tainted by the bias of what worked for myself at previous companies and teams. The title itself is new to me, but I'm no stranger at working with large groups of people in a volunteer, organizing or collaborative sense. I think it's much easier when folks are united under the same vision and goal--sometimes it's our jobs as leaders to instill that or make decisions and expectations clear about consequences of not contributing sufficiently... otherwise, it's like taking a basket of tricks and trying what works for each person, understanding the situation correctly and staying open to feedback upwards and laterally imo... I think I've found that asking everyone/everywhere about how I'm doing and how to succeed unlocks more about myself, my values and what kind of company (culture) I want to be in...
To me I recognize I had the greatest success by taking the time to get to know each person who I worked with (outside of group pressures, presentations etc) and learning what drives/annoys them, and how to work together.
Re: strong team or weak team... I don't believe it's always so absolute, most teams have a range of experiences and more often, communication issues that make working together well difficult. For example, the times I worked with folks with less experience but higher skill than me in an area. They were independently very productive but were not communicative about changes with the rest of the team, and also not open to being challenged. That aspect proved to be the most difficult even if they were the strongest dev and leading a project... everyone was jostling to keep up with them or trying to figure out what they did.
Spot on - a good leader doesn't play the control freak or (worse) the dictator, doesn't micro manage, doesn't try to do everything himself - a good (or let's say, effective) leader facilitates, encourages, mentors - tries to make OTHERS do better work.
I still feel like crying when I think about a totally brilliant manager/lead I worked for before... they would be available for bouncing ideas off, talk me through when I was stuck, and just allow me to take on the challenges of presenting solution architecture and estimates while being the shield/stop gap if the client bit my head off. It was such a great, inspiring example.
Yeah that sounds exactly like the way it should be :)
Since you replied supportively, I realize that being a judiciously empathetic leader is really difficult. It's hard not to measure others competence by your own yardstick and how much they remind you of yourself earlier in your career... perhaps those great manager/s of mine were good at handling this too
I'm new to doing all this with the title... I wonder how you deal with fear and resistance to changing circumstances amongst teammates? I've tried educating others on step-by-step chunking down, debugging, determining severity levels of bugs, or uncontrolled aspects of business needs which means surfacing tradeoffs... maybe it is simply that people want to vent?
This vibe easily spreads like wildfire and it's quite emotionally challenging to deal with.
What do you mean by "fear and resistance to changing circumstances"? it's a bit abstract ... yes I'm sure that sometimes people just want to vent, and sometimes it's probably even better to let them rather than go against it ...
I'm trying to be inexact so as to preserve the anonymity and difficulty of the situation I'm experiencing currently but have also seen before...
You're right though, recognizing whether people want to vent or want an immediate solution to their problem is also a muscle I need to build.
This is really helpful as I myself am transitioning from development only to a team leadership role. Thanks a lot! š
Congrats on your recent growth! I'm in a similar situation, and there's SO much to think about! :D