A Software House Divided

When I first started in the Cloud team at Glasswall back in July 2019, I had some brief introductions to the developers in the Core team. Their names given to me on the first day and then mostly forgotten by the second week.

For those unfamiliar with our Chelmsford office, we had our Cloud team upstairs, and our Core team downstairs. This was the setup before I joined and definitely contributed to this divide between colleagues we’ve been experiencing. It was very much the ‘downstairs people’ and the ‘upstairs people’.

Fortunately, the reason I came to this job was through a post on social media from my friend Tomas Skripkiunas, who had a fellow alumnus and friend downstairs, Tomas Pilvelis.

We would often chat about our work, I was interested in the C++ development Tom P was doing, and knew that we had developers upstairs with experience and interests in the exact things he was describing.

One day he mentioned that he and his team were stressed while finishing off a feature for an upcoming release. I asked him “Why not ask for help from the guys upstairs? We have some downtime and I’m sure our manager wouldn’t mind lending a dev or two”. It seemed out of the question, like the idea was crazy.

As of February 2020, this has completely changed with the introduction of Squads and Guilds. Now I’m working with 4 members of the core team, bringing our strengths together and learning from each other has been an amazing experience, and our Test Framework squad has seen some incredible results. I’m also having discussions with people from all over the company through our ‘Guild’ chats on Slack.

The dynamic between the two teams has changed completely in the space of a few weeks. Collaborating with colleagues has never been easier and Glasswall is in a completely different ball park than this time last year.