Vice president of Watercress Project: Talking about the management of technical team

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The writer is vice president of Douban Engineering, Dening, who has more than 10 years of experience in software industry, engaged in communications, embedded systems, the Internet and other industries work.

Near the end of the year, received the "programmer" magazine invitation, I hope I can write a team management related to the year-end inventory article, Inventory 2013 industry and team management-related events. 2013 can be summed up as a team management events are many, such as Yahoo! Beauty CEO announced the abolition of Home Office system, and recently ranked according to the results of the performance evaluation began to lay off workers; Recently, I know that the "you ask what to leave XX Company" series, all kinds of answers come out, Provides a lot of material for 2013 team management events. Unfortunately, people who are not in the Bureau, even with the best intentions to try to find out, it is difficult to peek at it, so the author is very heroic Jiangshan, it is very likely to end up a irrelevant. Pondering this, do not feel shyly. is to be rebuffed, suddenly and think, although not a "dirt this year Wan Hu" addiction, in the mouth of the snake tail, and you share the 2013 in the domestic team management of the various terms, is also quite interesting things. Of course, I am in the Internet industry, do the main technical team management of things, the scope of vision, can only be my personal experience as the basis of the entire article.

2013 and you shall sing my name on the stage.

Speaking of team management, I think it's a problem for a team of more than one person. Small team size, strong individual ability, rely on individual ability to maintain the team, and if the team size is larger, generally need to devote more effort to establish a good team collaboration system, rely on culture and system to build Team execution. From Microsoft to Google to Facebook, no exceptions. Of course, the size and team management of the way can not be simply equated, a huge company such as Google, still on the basis of good engineer culture, maintain a relatively loose and flexible team management system.

Team management is not a mystery and a high-end thing, what kind of team management is related to the organization's goals and cultural roots (in other terms, the company's founder and early employees), but also the current environment (including the industry environment and the company's internal environment). With the rise of a wave of organization, a burst of environmental change, the team management field of the term also like Yangtze. In the 2013 stage, the whole-end engineers, self-organizing team, recruit training camp and other nouns sparkling.

There is an old saying: There is nothing new in the sun. "This is a very good place to be in the field of team management," he said. Looking at the atmosphere of the technical team, from the software field of the prehistoric era of individual combat hacker groups, to the weight of software engineering under the constraints of "development resources", and then to the lightweight software engineering to the individual ability to pay attention to the way the team management in the "focus on individuals" and "pay attention to Clearly, what kind of team management approach is nothing more than "the current stage to maximize the benefits of the practice" and "team member expectations" between the game results. Fortunately, this game does not have to be a zero-sum game, but can be a cooperative game. Agile approach regards software development as the "cooperative game" of the team and tries to find a new balance between the efficiency of software development, customer satisfaction and the satisfaction of engineers. In the past several years, the agile trend of thought has been rapidly attacking the software domain, although it is because it can improve the efficiency, meet the needs of the customers and the business development, on the other hand, the agile method has better balance the needs of the team and the development individual.

Anyway, the software industry has developed to the present, the software from the original individual hand-made into the need for a certain scale of the collaborative era, the rapid growth of software practitioners, software development tools are gradually reducing the threshold of development, a variety of software development methods and practices are endless, which makes the software industry team management is increasingly rich. In the present, I'm afraid it's hard for us to use a particular pattern or architecture to describe the technical team management trends in the software industry, but to be active in the 2013-year technical team management stage of the term, perhaps to open a window for us to see through these Terms of technical team management in the field of the tide.

2013 Final term Inventory

All-End Engineers (full Stack Engineer)

2013 is the most impressive technical team management terminology, not the "whole-end engineer" Mo. "Full-end engineer" refers to those engineers with multi-terminal development capabilities (such as front-end, back-end, mobile development, and even operational dimensions), such engineers can be a person to work on a project, or at least one person to handle a function of all design and development. From "Front-End engineers" (I heard that some companies even have "JavaScript engineers" and "HTML engineers" Division of Labor), "back-end engineers" and other increasingly refined job descriptions into high-end atmosphere of the "whole-end engineer", which changes can not be a simple noun replacement.

As in real society, the world of programmers is evolving. Social division of labor is often a sign of progress, so it's not surprising when programmers split into architects, designers, development engineers, and when development engineers refine Cheng engineers and front-end engineers, we can also think of it as the progress and development of programmers ' society. But what about "all-end engineers"? is the development of social division of labor no longer applicable in the programmer's world? And the title of the "whole-end engineer" is particularly reminiscent of the prehistoric age of the software sector, when hackers were real full-time engineers (of course, I guess they don't necessarily like engineers. This is not cool title, software hardware, programming circuit omnipotent.

What does the concept of "End-to-end engineer" mean in the current software environment? It seems to me that the concept of a "whole-end engineer" is directly related to the development of tools and the need for more "rapid" development. The development of language and development tools, coupled with the increasing standardization of technology development platforms and the increasing sophistication of the frameworks and components that can be used directly, can make it easier for engineers today to master multiple-terminal development skills than a few years ago. On the other hand, "rapid" development and deployment, which are increasingly being valued, are looking for an optimized part of the development process. Obviously, if an engineer can complete a feature or product from the front end to the back end, the communication costs between developers, developers, and associated collaborators will undoubtedly become smaller and the development response will be faster. An organization with enough "whole-end engineers" is clearly able to develop products at a faster rate and at lower cost, while a "whole-end engineer" with a full-end development capability clearly has a better adaptability and ability to change the world. The "Race Against the Machine", which refers to the economic cycle as an increase in productivity, argues that the rise in productivity is the main cause of the change in employment structure, and that those who cannot keep up with the changes in productivity will be ruthlessly eliminated by society. Although I do not agree with this book on the reasons for the economic cycle of judgment, but about the future, I would like to say: "A recruit fresh, eat the day" has long been unworkable. Future engineers no longer need to define themselves with the front end or the back-end name, and change will only leave the conservative person out of the car. The role of technology is to meet the needs that users have shown or have not shown. For engineers, the place to play value is still strong links to products. Actively exert the power of technology, influence products, influence design, explore various possibilities, use technology to help their organization change the world is the way to the future.

Self-organizing team (self-organizing)

The term "self-organizing team" also had a big market in 2013. The term itself is not new, but this year, I have heard speakers on many occasions to mention the term, either to introduce their own self-organizing team experience, or vowed to become self-organizing team. So what exactly is this self-organizing team?

In fact, self-organization should be seen as the normal state of the universe: atoms become molecules from self-organization, and cells become life. If the enterprise is compared to life, from the development process of life, we are now accustomed to this completely top-down control is weird and unnatural. Of course, social organizations are not life, but more and more studies have shown that organizations are closer to complex systems like life, rather than simple deterministic systems with predictable outputs for specific inputs.

What does self-organization mean for a team? In an organization, no participant has complete information and cannot fully understand the entire system. Therefore, participants must brainstorm. But if participants do not become real decision-makers, they will not be able to take any action even if they can bring all the information together and get a sensible solution. In addition, from a psychological point of view, if there is no reasonable incentive mechanism to allow participants to focus their information and solve problems, then the organization can not quickly respond to the problems encountered. A self-organizing team requires good communication and decision-making mechanisms, as well as good motivational and motivational mechanisms.

Of course, everything is not extreme. Imagine that a business is a team that is organized entirely by individuals, can it work properly? I think it's hard. After all, the goals of an organization are unlikely to be exactly the same as that of an individual. In this sense, there must be some degree of control in the organization, which makes it possible for the organization to move smoothly towards the goals of the organization. However, excessive control is often the main reason for stifling innovation, Lutz in the book "Performance Death" with vivid examples of how GM, once a proud American company, became lifeless and depressed under super control. What we have to decide, then, is what kind of balance we choose between self-organization and control. And as a manager, borrowing the description of the book "Management 3.0", managers are like gardeners in the garden: occasionally taking care of mature systems, allowing them to solve their own problems, frequently maintaining young systems to grow according to the will of the organization, and discovering and cleaning up systems that tend to die.

Boot Camp (Basecamp)

In the 2013, the boot camp "suddenly as the night spring", the moment in a number of companies stand firm. Companies began to build their own boot camp, the name of the training camp is also different from the honest and simple "boot camp" to the high-end atmosphere of the "Special Forces training camp", and so on. In fact, these software companies have long been aware of the importance of the new force, but also has a variety of forms of staff training to help new employees quickly into their own organizations. Although the new staff trained the sheep under the head, the company sold different dog meat, some enterprises to boot training camp into a technical training camp, and some enterprises to the boot camp into a "brainwashing camp." But there is no doubt that these organizations do not understand the importance of new employees or the mechanism to help new employees become familiar with the working environment, why is it that the boot camp will receive extra attention on the 2013-year stage?

The name of boot camp has already been widely accepted in the domestic software industry and should be linked to Facebook practice. "There are a lot of people in the industry who are in charge of managing the engineering team and don't want to write the code themselves, but the practical people we're looking for are willing to be tested by the boot camp," Zuckerberg said in an open letter released in 2012 when he announced the IPO. Facebook's boot camp is notoriously rigorous, not just a place to train and train people, but also a factory that produces truly organized culture. There is no doubt that Facebook's boot camp has a lot to learn from, whether it's organized, it's mandatory, and its mentoring mechanism is commendable. However, in anticipation of the cultural role of the boot camp, you may have to keep a lot of snacks.

I believe that every manager wants his organization to be a "culture" organization, and is willing to spend a considerable amount of energy to "build" corporate culture in his organization. So Facebook's boot camp is a really good way to emulate it-culture, new hires. However, setting up a boot camp, designing a curriculum, and sending trainers to shout slogans can make the new members of the team a "culture-compliant" individual? Obviously not so simple. Culture is not a vague slogan, the organization's working methods, tools, processes, incentive mechanism, etc. is the real enterprise culture embodiment. A company that arranges a separate office for the manager and sets the size of the office according to the level may not be able to convince new employees that "equal respect" is the company's culture, even if they find the best trainer in the world. Therefore, to emulate the boot camp, the first thing to understand is that Facebook's boot camp is just an integral part of its cultural system, not a producer of culture. Instead of spending a lot of time tossing boot camp, be honest about building the cultural roots of your team. To be blunt, boot camp is worth learning from its ideas and practices, rather than expecting it to become a brainwashing machine within the organization.

Written in the last words

2013 is about to pass and the software industry will turn over a new page. In this time of change, I try to find out from memory the three nouns that have been heard the most this year, to be glimpse, and to share with you the understanding of technical team management.