{"id":1023,"date":"2014-04-15T15:10:25","date_gmt":"2014-04-15T22:10:25","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/10kdev.net\/?p=1023"},"modified":"2014-04-21T12:47:42","modified_gmt":"2014-04-21T19:47:42","slug":"the-downton-developers","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/10kdev.net\/?p=1023","title":{"rendered":"The Downton Developers"},"content":{"rendered":"

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In 2012 in St. Paul, Minnesota the Team One Club<\/em> was founded for the exclusive developer of discerning taste. Membership includes nights out with Rocky Patel, Padr\u00f3n,\u00a0Do\u00f1a Er\u00f4 and\u00a0Cohiba cigars and the finest of craft beer, scotch and rye whiskeys and of exceptional dining events.<\/p>\n

We also have lighter nights out; on these perhaps a Dunhill or Acid or Ashton, smaller gauge, shared with an Irish whiskey or a Negroni; generally cocktails and games or perhaps by the outside fire pit. \u00a0Dress is more casual.<\/p>\n

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These code investors know that \u00a0membership in\u00a0Team One Club<\/em> is *exclusively* a white collar affair.<\/p><\/div>\n

Discussions of technology, philosophy and the finer things of development ensue.<\/p>\n

The Team One Club<\/em> enjoys it’s prime rib, it’s Frank Sinatra, and it’s bacon wrapped rumaki. \u00a0Bacon is an oft discussed topic and sometimes for fun we order bacon and Pabst to remind ourselves of our humble roots.<\/p>\n

Now I am sure many of you are wondering, how did such an exclusive and wonderful group that, perhaps, you could join — how did it all start?<\/p>\n

The inception of the Team One Club<\/em> came from a need for experienced developers to escape the project injustices which will happen until the end of time. \u00a0This happens a lot; many project tasks are a matter of favoritism and not ability or collaboration. \u00a0At our work another upstart team, Team 2, had a get- along-gang of developers. \u00a0They were the apple of managements’ eye and also a bunch of hacks. \u00a0But they did things together like rock climb, hug, and produce JavaScript with hardcoded dates. \u00a0They threw little bowling parties and took group photos of themselves when they went to Taco Bell pledging to be BFF’s forever.<\/p>\n

Team 2 also shit all over, socially, other teams. \u00a0The stench of hot steaming Team 2 was pervasive.<\/p>\n

Problems became obvious when we had our combined team tech meetings. \u00a0The other teams were biting off the sucky work and being ignored. \u00a0However Team 2 would get 45 minutes of the hour to present string parsing algorithms or CSS color combo ideas while the other teams would be told to “keep it short” as they would present things like database sharding code, new annotation and point cut implementations, and custom JMX extensions. \u00a0Eventually Team 2, in their great wisdom, would get to reinvent these wheels and present them in their great depth, many times after skillful ctrl-c\/ctrl-v pair programming.<\/p>\n

For me, the need for the Team One Club<\/em> became quite clear when “senior” developers from Team 2 would come over and dump their bugs that they made onto our team, and manage us from a “heads I win, tails you lose” standpoint. \u00a0Oh they learned fast about office politics; not about productivity but the facade thereby.Slowly the new fun development got stolen from our team merely because we had no bugs to fix, and was given to the exciting Team 2 for development — they would hack it up and we would fix their bugs. \u00a0Then they would refer to the banalities they checked in as “their code” and have meetings lecturing us on how not to break it while we fixed their bugs.<\/p>\n

At one point, we had written a ton of Oracle code for some data migrations in a streams environment, but that wouldn’t stop Team 2 from getting in on the action. \u00a0They decided they wanted to um, learn Oracle — and instead of working with any team they hacked their way through select statements, and “oh! \u00a0group by is neat” and again got credit for completing bug filled tasks that we on the other teams fixed. The franticness of Team 2 — emails at midnight, checkins on Friday afternoon, necessary overtime, the “high energy environment”, useless resume padding technologies that needed fixing and twixing and naught but a look — all approved by the management.<\/p>\n

Team 2 swaggered. And ashes, ashes Team 2 fell down.<\/p>\n

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Team One Club’s<\/em> Fancy Dress Ball with Candlelight Supper is *the* event of the season.<\/p><\/div>\n

When Team 2 started to fall apart, as they all teams do eventually, the promises of tomorrow were broken. \u00a0The silly pictures of nerf gun fights meant nothing as they lost contact with each other, lost respect for each other. \u00a0Sick days were taken. \u00a0Such an emotional ride. \u00a0Very “high energy” \u00a0“fast paced” finale.<\/p>\n

That day came also the demise of the original work team that comprised the founding members of Team One Club. <\/em>We\u00a0had to take on Team 2 style management. \u00a0I still remember the first meeting when we were asked to tell everyone what kind of tree we’d like to be; what our favorite Olympic sport uniform was, \u00a0how many flavors of Jelly Belly’s we had tried together \u00a0at the same time, and to hug the person to the left. \u00a0Snobbery came in, sanity left. \u00a0“Management’s Family Cabins” \u00a0were named in emails (“such as “I will be attending the Smith Family Vacation Estate” — that comprised of an unheated hunting trailer without any shoreline and a 5 gallon bucket for a commode). \u00a0A giant monstrous internal social site — TwitBook– popped up on the intranet where people would post their ideas and get points for their activity. \u00a0Funny enough, upper management was running point totals in the thousands (you got a point for a comment, 10 for a post etc. — and management could give you points). \u00a0Rumor had it there was an old skee ball prize counter where you could cash your points in, but this was never corroborated. \u00a0Usually, Team 2 remaining members could be overheard stealing ideas from another team that sat in a cube farm across from us and Team 2 would post the ideas as their own getting these social media points.<\/p>\n

Oh we just laughed. \u00a0Salty developers like us know that all contracts are not made of gold, many fade as they became old. \u00a0We formed Team One Club<\/em>. We enjoy our jobs; we enjoy our lives. We learn technologies pragmatically with ease and we don’t complain about Java, .Net, relational databases or anything else. We just like to make things. \u00a0And we treat others with humility and respect.<\/p>\n

Today\u00a0Team One Club<\/em> lives on. \u00a0I encourage all to make a Team One Club<\/em>, one that’s not exclusive and really relishes the vocations we have where we get to make things. \u00a0Where we appreciate sharing a good cocktail and have lives off the job site. \u00a0We don’t mix our social media and our work, our InfoQ retweets and our vacation pictures. \u00a0We have our fun with a smile; our shop talk revolves around solutions.<\/p>\n

Team One Club<\/em> is an insufferably grand time.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In 2012 in St. Paul, Minnesota the Team One Club was founded for the exclusive developer of discerning taste. Membership includes nights out with Rocky Patel, Padr\u00f3n,\u00a0Do\u00f1a Er\u00f4 and\u00a0Cohiba cigars and the finest of craft beer, scotch and rye whiskeys and of exceptional dining events.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[14,17],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/10kdev.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1023"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/10kdev.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/10kdev.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/10kdev.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/10kdev.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1023"}],"version-history":[{"count":26,"href":"http:\/\/10kdev.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1023\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1051,"href":"http:\/\/10kdev.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1023\/revisions\/1051"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/10kdev.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1023"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/10kdev.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1023"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/10kdev.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1023"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}