On Fri, Oct 12, 2012 at 7:24 AM, Sam Livingston-Gray <
gee...@gmail.com> wrote:
> I'd reply in more depth, but I'm on Maui and still waking up. In an hour or so,
> I'm going to pair with someone in the Portland office on a different team, and
> next week I hope to do some pairing with my teammate in India. No wifi in the
> condo, but fortunately work shipped me a Mifi right before I left. ;)
[Disclaimer: this is my own opinion, not necessarily that of my
(unnamed but easily discoverable) current or previous employers.]
As much fun as the above was to write, my current experience has
definitely not been the norm. I've had some jobs where I've worked
from home (or CubeSpace, RIP), and some jobs where the expectation was
that work was mostly co-located. My last job had 5-8 devs primarily
in the same space, and that definitely had its advantages for ad-hoc
pairing. The camaraderie on that team was also excellent, though this
was probably as much a function of its composition as its location.
There are definitely tradeoffs in distributing teams, too. At any
given point, I'm not sure I could give you a complete and accurate
roster of who's on "my team"; I'm still not entirely sure what "my
team" is. That's partly distribution, partly rotation, and partly
sheer size, but still.
As for identifying with the company overall, there were [at least] six
of us at Aloha Ruby Conf. I had a great time at the conference, had
some good conversations, and paired with some brilliant developers,
but none of those were with people I (nominally) work with. I saw one
person I'd interacted with briefly during a company hackathon, had one
or two chats with my manager's manager, and was briefly introduced to
three more developers. (Admittedly, I get more chances to meet
coworkers than most of the people at conferences, so that was probably
the right mix for me, but still.)
-Sam