Comment by seglo | Hacker News Reader

Comment by seglo | Hacker News Reader

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OP here. Thanks for your feedback.

The Technical Strategy email was sent out about midway through our adoption of Scala. I didn't explain the dynamics of our larger development department much in my post, but at that time we were essentially two teams in two different physical locations. The location I was at had already seen success with a few projects in Scala (BeetleJuice and the beginning of our API). Our CTO thought it was time to set a clear direction for the future of development department after an analysis of our current situation and discussion with members of the wider team.

Nobody was shown with the door. I'll admit there was some resentment, but nothing a well adjusted developer couldn't get over.

As I mentioned at the end of the post, one thing I would do differently in the future is make a stronger effort around consensus building about the decision. However, the Scala change started off as something small and organically grew into a legitimate alternative to the Microsoft stack. Going into our first project (BeetleJuice) we didn't anticipate the impact it would ultimately have on the organization.

Cool, thank you for the context (which is everything in these situations.) And apologies if I implied things that weren't the case; just my reading/interpretation of the post.

My primary criticism of the CTO's email was that it didn't seem direct, which I've found is the most important aspect when communicating in that role. With all the intentions of being inclusive and providing avenues for flexibility, I've found the interpretations are most often viewed as ambiguous. The higher up the chain, clarity becomes so much more important. Live and learn, in my case.

In terms of consensus building, I had to do the same thing. For me, we accomplished that through objectivity -- we were constantly evaluating. We asked team members who liked technology A to provide brown-bag sessions on technology B. We had "skin-the-cat" sessions, where we would have a team of two or three implement a somewhat basic solution in three different ways (you know, nine ways to skin a cat....). It took some doing, but essentially what we did was enable developers who might not be so flexible to considering alternative technologies to get comfortable with those by spending time using them and providing an opportunity for them to say "this sucks" or "this is awesome". The team, as it was constructed, really responded well to this. Not only did they feel involved, but they were also tacitly preparing themselves to accommodate a shift, no matter which way it went. I was really surprised at how well the team became empowered; it was not something I was expecting to see.

Your CTO definitely had a tricky process and conversion to balance. I empathize, it's so easy to do a mediocre job with things that one wouldn't expect to matter quite so much.

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