Beautiful Teams

Trouble in River City

Things were going great until one ominous Monday morning. Wally, our newest engineer, showed up unannounced and with an attitude. He had some history with Ellen, and right away he started with a rude form of humor, cutting deep into her. After I told him to cut it out, he insisted he was kidding, but you could see it hurt her. The knifelike kidding did not stop.

Big companies have this bad habit of treating people like parts in a machine. The first sign is referring to people as resources. Someone in management thought that Wally was a plug-replaceable programming unit. Through some magic of "resource availability" and project priority, we got Wally this fateful morning.

Wally was bright, but he had no idea what our team culture was. Our team was collaborative, and we were excited about taking on the process and technical challenge the project offered. All the team members identified with the team, and wanted to be part of it and to live by the standards and work ethic we had adopted. Wally did not get or want to get why we were writing tests. He did not get why we were not doing a big design first. He did not get the short iterations and, surprise: he was no suitable pair partner. His humor disrupted standup meetings and pair programming sessions.

I recognized right away that Wally was not going to work out. Fred wanted us to try to integrate him into the team. We tried, but sand does not go well with contact lens cleaner—it's too abrasive. In the end, Fred saw ...