Musing about the Unicorn Project
The interesting side effect of the Coronavirus lock down has been the amount of time I now have. No longer is the commute 2 hours a day or am I spending my days in endless meetings. For us introverts, it has been a time to reflect, to think about the wins .. and the loses. And its had a recharging effect, rekindling my passion for software engineering again.
I finished the “Unicorn Project” this week, the follow up book to the “Phoenix Project” by Gene Kim. The phoenix project, by the way, is still the bible of the DevOps movement. Yeah, SRE or countless other resources give you the technical background, but phoenix project allowed that conversation to occur outside our little engineering silo. I probably give the book too much credit, but I do think its deserved.
Anywho, the unicorn project is the next installment. It tackles being an engineer in a traditional enterprise attempting modern software engineering. But, at its core, team building and allowing engineers to provide value for the enterprise is the focus.
Team building is still the most important topic in our field. I get it. We live in a complex technical environment that has layers of abstractions. From front end tools that endlessly change (I am looking at you, javascript frameworks), to kubernetes to data science, the technical world is always shifting and that shift is the beacon that draws most of us to this industry. And wouldn’t it be awesome if the next framework, or the next language, solved all of our organizations problems?
Unfortunately, the reality is different. The highest level of complexity goes no further than our slack channels, or emails, or zooms. The most complex thing we will encounter is within those interpersonal relationships among teammates and the organization you work for.
The scene in the book I’d like to explore… the engineering team just concluded its first blameless post mortem after a mis-configured environment caused a build to fail, creating a 30 minute outage. Upper management is out for blood. They are frustrated with outages and want to continue the culture of blame that has developed over years of bureaucracy at parts unlimited. The manager, the knight in shinning armor, resists upper management, and instead sets the ground rules for his team that this is about learning and not blame. Long story short, it works. The team communicates and develops changes to the technology and process that makes the release process better in the future.
The story itself is lame, but the lesson is resolute. Maxine (the main character) reflects on this experience: “.. I now appreciates how tenuous and fleeting the conditions that enable physiological safety can be. It depends on the behavior of leaders, one’s peers, their moods, their sense of self-worth, and wounds from their past..” I would add “and you are not the code you write, or the ops you do”. We build sandcastles. Its important for us to be good at our jobs, and you live, you learn, and you move on.
As the world talks about the new normal, working remotely permanently has become this new thing (I am making an assumption that one day the coronavirus will be under control and the pandemic will go away). And its with that backdrop I want to discuss the new normal and the field of software engineering.
Up front: I have no problem working remotely. In fact, I love the idea. We should be more flexible in with our workforce, and we should encourage environments that promote healthy work/life balance.
And, we have made an incredible leap in recent years having engineers work directly with the business — with designers, subject matter experts, financial people, etc al. These cross-functional teams work. And the output is producing products that users want and actually use.
Breaking down the barriers between functional units will always be a thing. And in the virtual environment of the future, especially as managers — but really for everyone — we will need to double down on this effort, and work extra hard ensuring teams continue to be non-homogeneous.
Alrighty — enough for my rant for now. For those looking for “thumbs up” or “thumbs down” for Unicorn Project, I give it a thumbs up. Its basically a goofy story in the same vein as the Phoenix Project or the Goal, but still, its worth reading.
