
Ask HN: Have you had experience with short term role/team rotations? - comradesmith
Hi HN. In my company (specialist software) we&#x27;re thinking about a short term &#x27;foreign exchange&#x27; programme, where two members of different teams swap for a sprint or two, to try and understand what goes on in other teams and learn their challenges.<p>Has anyone here participated in such a short-term exhange? Was it worth your time?
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muzani
I regularly consult for teams, so I guess that's similar. The big thing going
is that it could take a very long time to learn to build something. Even for
seniors, it can be a week or more, if there was no focus on onboarding.

However, it's always been very useful. Normally you hear of 'buzzwords' \-
kotlin, reactive, functional, dependency injection, architectures, all these
things, but tutorials give you little to nothing. But once they're used in a
project, the value (and downsides) are immediately clear.

It's also useful to learn some things, like how the caching works, why this
thing is a bottleneck. Or some habits, like one person has their set of tools
and configs which turned out to be really powerful.

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giantg2
I think that would only be helpful if you're brining in an expert to
consult/swarm on an issue.

We have a rotation program that involves three 6 months rotations for select
new hires. The company claims that gives those people exposure to a broader
understanding of technology and business use cases. I think that's true. I
think it also builds their professional network in the company. This seems to
work ok.

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2rsf
We tried that for a while at Microsoft but a sprint or two are too short to
being meaningful results. You should think about what do you want to achieve
and how much is needed to actually do that- if the teams uses similar
technologies, infrastructure and code base than it is possible to achieve
something in short periods of time otherwise it would be a waste of time

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maps7
Haven't done that exactly. What benefits are you hoping for? What negatives do
you think it might have?

