Ask HN: What is collaboration like for you these days?

[propeller_head]

At my company I'm part of a team which is composed only of seniors. We have a lot of work and basically each team member works independently reaching out to other team members when they need an opinion or validate and idea/design.

There's no pairing. Comms is basically async.

I did see situations however where a design was taken forward (approved by the team) just to be heavily criticised during implementation - reasons unknown.

Things like this happen, it's natural, especially if you have competing priorities.

But it makes me think if all teams of seniors are like that? Collaboration can be async but the parallel work aspect feels very "unteam".

I guess I'm just getting old but in this post-Covid, hybrid working world we live in, is this "async ask when needed" style the new normal?

[al_borland]

My team is full of seniors and we have the same problem. I think there are ways we can come together as a team, but when the team formed we instantly had several huge projects dropped in our lap, and everyone had to keep supporting products from their previous team. This meant we never had a chance to sit down and figure out how we work. Where should code and documentation live? What do code reviews look like? What skills do we have within the team? What do meetings look like? How do we accept new work? How do we get feedback internally? How do we identify and raise awareness of issues holding us up? What operational tasks do we need to be aware of and how to we make sure they are getting done? What is the support model for the things we build?What happens when someone goes on vacation?

Because we were all seniors, the people running the team assumed this would all just magically happen, despite our insistence that these were topics we needed to talk about and decide as a team if we were going to work together effectively. We are several years into the team and it’s still a mess of mostly lone coders doing their own things, with the occasionally small sub-group collaborating on a project. I’ve almost given up and am just waiting for the next re-org so we can try again. I’ve told our scrum master we need a retrospective at the end of our sprints at least 20 times. We haven’t had a single one, I don’t think he knows what it is. I’ve been trying really hard not to do his job for him, but it’s hard holding back the urge to Nick Burns him.

[interbased]

Collaboration is mostly done when doing investigatory work to scope out a new project. Once work is divided up amongst team members, we mostly go our own way. It can also be a working session to solve a particularly challenging problem together.

[antoineMoPa]

In terms of coding, I love collaboration when it's necessary, but I dread it when it's forced.

I feel like sync communication is necessary for groomings & design review.

> design was taken forward (approved by the team) just to be heavily criticised during implementation

Pretty strange that it was approved by the team and then criticized. Is this a recurring thing or just a one-off issue people did not spot early enough? If it's frequent, the team should either do a better job of discussing before implementation or understand that they have to unite behind the decision once a design is approved.

[CM30]

What collaboration? At best my team is in your situation, and worst you end up with one where reaching out gets you no response whatsoever. It's gone into overdrive since the company announced they were outsourcing all their tech work elsewhere, but even before then getting people to collaborate was like pulling teeth sometimes.