I am not. We are in trouble as a tech business and have a very large piece of tech debt that we need to get over, this year. (We also have an amazing product and smart people invested in our growth. It’s one of those good problems to have, but it’s still a problem.)
We experimented (a long time ago, before I joined) with an “open source model” of siloed teams who made internal releases to each other. This had the unfortunate side effect of hampering our release process and also, far worse, embedding a really unproductive them-vs-us culture that holds back our ability to ship on time.
On a technical level, it’s kind of like the bad old days of when people all had their own branches, and all tried to merge at once in the week of the release. If you’re familiar with this anti-pattern then we are in a similar situation but with individual repositories instead of branches.
Our team has a lot of veterans, many with the title architect, and all of whom are emotionally invested in the status quo being the right approach. There’s a lot of friction between us. Frankly this might not be the right team for me in the long run, but there are so many awesome people here as well that I want to make it work.
We objectively have a problem shipping our product, and because most of the old guard work remotely it is nigh on impossible to effectively build consensus around making any kind of big change. It is very a hard ship sail.
The saving grace? My manager and I go in three days a week. So does our VP Eng and the manager and tech lead of a couple of other important teams. We have whiteboard diagrams, 1:1 walks in the park, and chats in the kitchen. When we meet with the old guard, we sit together in a meeting room while they are on individual calls. I feel like we are getting somewhere, slowly, but an unsettling amount of time has been spent on how to effectively do staff-level persuasive tech-leadership, in the face of a highly talented but highly conservative cadre of senior engineers who keep themselves at arm’s length over Zoom.