[m104]

Oh lordy, the "two crews" bifurcation fully written down. What a fantastic way to ship until it becomes far too expensive to ship anything good.

Look, when we break the feedback loop back to the people who wrote the software in the first place, they get happier for a bit, you make some other people sadder for a bit, and then slowly your feature crew never want to be interrupted or bothered again and your customer crew can't get enough resources to fully fix anything.

Worse, your feature crews aren't learning anything beyond how to get those lines out the door, which will somehow get slower and more expensive as time goes on. Why? Because you removed the one fitness function on good software development which is to fully re-incorporate the negative feedback back into the source of development.

A real CTO leadership handbook would say clearly "it's your responsibility to help your developers improve, especially while shipping, and they're not always going to be happy about it."

[pyrale]

> It allows your feature team to remain 100 percent focused on the future, undistracted by customer support work.

AKA "it allows your feature team to be completely oblivious to the horrors they unleash, and keep at it until the ship is solidly planted in the iceberg"

Not talking about the conflicts it creates for merging between sales-supported feature teams and customer rep-supported maintenance teams. Given that the "customer crew" is described as something you grow out of, there's no question who wins arbitrages.

> It provides another career path for individual engineers, especially junior engineers, to learn and level up on your team.

"Senior staff doesn't want to fix shit so we have juniors do it"

[SkyPuncher]

Further, I'm not sure what efficiency it provides overall. Is dedicating 20% of your team to support _that_ much different than the entire team spending 20% of their time on support?

We've actually found our quality goes up massively when we force our engineers to deal with the problems in the features they ship, directly with customers. We still have dedicated front line support (that rotates weekly), but they run off a playbook for common support needs then delegate everything else out.

It really sucks when you get pulled into support a feature you launched, but it really makes you want to build your next features better. Better internal documentation, better customer documentation, better UX/requirements, better edge case handling, etc, etc.

[n4r9]

Further down the article:

> The Microsoft blog post referenced above recommends swapping some team members between the two crews every week.

This would hopefully mitigate the worst of the effect you describe, since everyone eventually gets exposed to the consequences of poor feature development.

[DanielHB]

Related topic, but every company I worked at that had a platform team (as in a third-crew support team that manages tools/practices/common-code for a discipline) ends up being infested with over-engineering.

They tend to attract that kinda of people who have disdain about delivering features and fixing bugs and like to over-abstract problems. Instead of fixing bugs they try to create increasingly complex abstractions to prevent the bugs from happening in the first place, with obvious results.

[Aurornis]

That has been the fate of every platform team I’ve worked with in recent years.

Then they become gatekeepers, refusing to allow anything on their platform unless it conforms to their ideal vision. The catch is that their vision won’t be ready to use for 6-12 months, so you can’t deploy. Now your biggest problems aren’t engineering, it’s constant politicking to get around the platform team.

Add to this the concept of “architects” who don’t code but jump from team to team critiquing their work and you have a recipe for getting nothing done. One half of engineering is coding and trying to ship, and the other half of engineering is gate keeping and trying to prevent anyone from shipping

[neumann]

argh! PTSD - This was exactly what happened at my last start-up. Two of the engineering team and one from the R&D team started a platform team and it became a pre-PMF product with the slickest pipelines, DevOps, Cloud-cost optimization ready to scale to infinity. But with no customers, a broken front-end, and a under-funded R&D team as all the effort was put into the essential SaaS Platform. Truly put the company back 1 year while burning two.

[actionfromafar]

I wonder though if there aren't more forces at play. For instance, the business problems some systems try to solve really are so large and complex, you might need some kind of overseeing function in your company.

Also I have a hunch a team dedicated to providing helper "libraries" more than than "frameworks" could provide a lot of value without so much downside. If you can call a library function without it imposing a whole framework on the rest of your codebase, it's more self-contained and can't spill its abstractions all over the place.

[SketchySeaBeast]

This was the first place I worked at. The platform team became more and more insular and detached and more and more convoluted. As a result, things got harder to add on and soon they were telling the implementation teams that the features that the clients were requesting couldn't possible be needed. Million dollar contracts but no, you don't need to be able to put links into text blocks, that's a stupid feature and the client can't possibly want it.

[hnthrow90348765]

>Look, when we break the feedback loop back to the people who wrote the software in the first place, they get happier for a bit, you make some other people sadder for a bit, and then slowly your feature crew never want to be interrupted or bothered again and your customer crew can't get enough resources to fully fix anything.

This is the PM's job - one or a few people who are deciding the vision of how all of the features fit together based on feedback by working with customers. Customers (esp. non-technical ones) will definitely not have a coherent product vision and only want immediate fixes regardless of what else may be planned. Customers may also not communicate to one another and their feedback can conflict.

If you put this burden on developer shoulders, they now have to manage all of that communication in addition to requiring technical skills to know the code base and maintain it well, on top of every developer needing to have the same coherent vision to make thoughtful decisions. That's now two to three jobs in one depending if your developers also manage infrastructure like many roles are requiring these days.

[marcinzm]

What you're describing is exactly the opposite of every actually successful team I've seen, and describes every mediocre team I've seen. Silos are death and not just in a code base. Good developers understand the product. Mediocre ones churn out tickets mindlessly.

[borski]

One thing that we did to account for this was to shift the teams every or every few sprints. It allowed folks to get more experience, still get feedback, since if they built a buggy feature they'd have to fix it, etc.

People seemed much happier with that, because they also didn't get tired of 'always fixing bugs' or never getting the feedback, which you insightfully mentioned.

[madeofpalk]

Developers must run and maintain the software they build. It's as simple as that.

[dowager_dan99]

The best development teams WANT this.

They will readily take on the responsibility to get the autonomy. The problem is many companies give the former without the latter...

[x0x0]

And take the calls.

Don't like being paged at 3am? Write robust software and test.

[JohnCClarke]

Well, what's the time horizon? A PE backed outfit, or a CTO looking to move on within a year or so, would be well advised to follow this guidance. Lots of success now, and the problems deferred to later.

[plomme]

The book mentions having a rota:

> Engineers rotate between the crews on a regular basis. The Microsoft blog post referenced above recommends swapping some team members between the two crews every week.

In my experience this works well. With my current and previous client each team had a "hero of the week", whose responsibility was second line support and monitoring. If nothing came up the hero would work on their tasks as usual.

If something does come up the heroes of the week would be tasked with solving it or pulling in someone who knows how to solve it. This leads to engineers both having to accept accountability for writing shoddy code, but it also exposes engineers to the wider codebase when pulling on threads. It also solves the issue where no-one or the same person always takes responsibility for handling bugs.

[dowager_dan99]

This just sounds like having a point developer. The challenge is too many companies expect this without giving up a feature-dev headcount. Any work the get done aside from point is a bonus and unplanned.

[marcinzm]

Isn't this just called on-call? That's very different from a separate team.

[bravetraveler]

This may put me and my peers out of work (in a good way). SRE is a consequence of this function being lost, IMO. Pattern: developers don't like it? Give it to Ops/SRE.

Take away the escape, we will all be better for it.

[bboreham]

I call them “shiny team and shitty team”.

[esafak]

It is not a problem if you measure and reward the infra team for their ability to enable the feature team, such as change lead time and deployment frequency, as well as the the stability metrics that the infra team might want to pursue.