3 Red Flags to Watch When You Join New Team

It’s Sunday evening. You go to sleep but one thought goes around your head. Tomorrow is your first day in a new team. New projects, team, and opportunities to build cool, useful products and learn new things.

A few hours forward. It’s Monday morning. You start a day with a usual routine: walk with a dog, then go jogging or hit the gym. There are several hours of sitting and standing ahead of you.

It’s time. You open your laptop and log into your new account. Surprisingly all goes smoothly. It’s 10AM. Slack and calendar notifications remind you to click the button and join the meeting.

Welcome to the team. Your new manager greets you. After the introduction of all team members, the ritual starts. JIRA, jira tickets everywhere. As you are not a newbie in the tech game, you listen, watch, analyse and spot behaviour patterns.

Initial excitement fades away. Why? What are the red flags?

Red Flag 1 - Separate tickets for unit tests

That’s what punched you in the face first. A bunch of Add Unit Tests tickets linked to various Stories.

Hold on. It’s not only the separate tickets. It’s which swimlane they appear in and what tickets they refer to.

All relevant User Stories seem to be in the Done column. What? And you suddenly hear:

The story is finished, we need to only add unit tests.

What? You keep listening.

Red Flag 2 - Separate, low-priority tasks labelled “refactoring”

As your new colleagues keep reporting the progress, the manager moves Jira tickets from one column to another. Done. Done. In Progress. In Progress. In QA. Yes, you see this correctly In QA.

Then, your new colleagues start talking about the low-priority tasks labelled refactoring.

We don’t have time for this right now. It’s not a priority for business - the project owner confirms.

Hold on. Do they talk about so-called technical debt?

The discussion diverges into deeper technical details about decisions taken years back. You start understanding why the period is measured in years. It’s not re-designing. It’s refactoring. Like, you know, the good old Boy Scout rule Uncle Bob has been preaching for years:

Always leave the campground cleaner than you found it.

And you realise that less and less people in tech know who the Uncle Bob is. Yes. Reading books is not so popular nowadays, and so is thinking long-term. Aren’t we all going to be replaced by the army of Devins anyway?

Red Flag 3 - Manager estimates and assigns tasks to team members

As the circle finishes it’s time to put new work on the table. The tasks are already lined up by priority. No discussion is needed. The product owner sorted everything for the team to make life easier. You eagerly waiting to discuss what the team will work on. Who will work with whom and on what.

Then, the manager picks up stories and assigns vague numbers, telling what size and time he thinks it would take. Mick gets his ticket, Jane her ticket, Ana her and Andrew his. That’s nice.

The planning is finished, and you hear:

After this meeting, I want to have all stories assigned and know who is working on what. One person, one ticket.

Great. Tickets assigned. Planning finished. You need to read documentation and the code. Mick will help you if you get stuck.

In the end personal accountability is paramount. How on earth would management and HR know how many JIRA tickets and points everyone managed to mark as done at the end of the quarter?

Monday is almost gone. After dinner, you relax in the armchair and read another chapter from The Mythical Man-Month.

Something whispers: What can go wrong this time?

Is it your unconcious mind?