No Open Blockers

I have no reservations in saying that my current team, the Satellite/Spacewalk team, is by far the best team I’ve ever worked on. I’ve never been part of a team with the sort of cooperation, encouragement, helpfulness, lack of ego, and flat out talent that we have.

That’s not to say all of my previous teams were bad. At Gestalt, I worked with some incredible developers and from a team perspective we had great chemistry. We were just incredibly unlucky when it came to finding reasonably competent management. My previous team, the JON/RHQ/Jopr team at JBoss, has some of the brightest developers I’ve ever worked with and I really learned a ton from them. So don’t get me wrong, it’s not that I’ve been dealt pure crap as far as teams go.

It’s just that the Spacewalk team has such a great chemistry. Generally speaking, developers tend to have very big egos, commonly manifested by claiming that any code they didn’t personally write sucks (I attribute this to them being bullied in high school so now shit-talking about programming is their only avenue of power, but that’s for another entry). Our team is actually very much the opposite. When I fire off a question in our chat room, the developers are usually pretty quick to assume ownership and place the blame on themselves. This humility often leads to them being very open to other approaches and ideas, which helps across the board from the project as a whole to the developer’s personal growth. Not to mention how draining it can be working on an abrasive team.

Encouragement and appreciation is also something that’s sorely lacking on many teams. It’s amazing how energizing a one line e-mail like “Nice job” or “Slick!” is to receive. These sorts of praise don’t just come from our boss/team lead; it’s very common for other developers to understand we’re all working towards the same goal and appreciate any steps in that direction.

This idea also manifests itself in another way on our team: karma.

As a remote team, we all sit in a number of chat rooms during the day (many of us leave ourselves logged in at night too). In our internal Red Hat chat room for the team, we have a number of bots we leave in the room as well. Some have extremely cool purposes as far as managing the QA lab (an entry for another time, but trust me, it’s friggin cool) and others sit there and hurl insults at random people in the chat room (I’m not kidding about that). One of these bots keeps track of karma.

[jdob] dgoodwin++
[redken] dgoodwin now has 167 points of karma.

What does having karma get you? Absolutely nothing. It’s not factored into our raises/bonuses, you can’t redeem it for prizes… hell, I’ve never even seen people brag about their karma points. I was never even told about it when I joined the team. After a few days in the chat room, I noticed the trend and quickly started participating.

So why am I making such a big deal about it? It’s an extremely simple, quick, lightweight thank you system. You don’t need to have a big spectacle of thanks that is only used in extremely exceptional cases. It takes more to build a team than going out to lunch to celebrate a release. The daily things, no matter how small they sound on paper, are worth a ton when it comes to team chemistry and morale.

Someone answers a question or helps you out? Give them karma. Someone made a particular cool little utility for navigating bugzilla? Karma there too. I’ve even gotten karma for taking a particularly funny shot at our competitors (I’ll leave that intentionally ambiguous).

The karma points aren’t worth anything tangible, but they do speak a bit about the developer. They show that a teammate appreciated the extra effort or time you spent making their lives easier. While I haven’t seen anyone brag about their karma points, it really does say a lot when redken spits back that someone has 200 karma points.

I question how much of this post my students will be able to appreciate, not necessarily having worked in a work team environment. If nothing else, keep it in mind when you graduate and find your way into the workforce. As trivial as the karma system might sound, never underestimate the team building nature of simple appreciation, whatever the form it takes.