Frances Rees

Google

Don’t get too excited, I’m not looking to move yet, but it’s fun to imagine what team #4 will be like. There are, of course, the important questions: What do you work on? How big is the team? Who are the other teams you work with? And then there are the questions that go beyond the formal interviews and role descriptions.

Here’s what I hope is true.

I hope you eat lunch together. Maybe not every day, but I hope you can talk to each other outside of meetings. I hope you can introduce me to all the teams nearby and point out the one to ask about this tool, that kind of bug, or the other shared service.

I hope you ask lots of questions. Questions you feel a little awkward about asking because you think they might be dumb or obvious. Questions about how things work, why things are the way they are, why you do things the way you do, what value you’re trying to add with a project. Questions you’re not even sure have an answer.

I hope you love telling stories as much as I do. Stories of achievements, hard-learned lessons, or just funny things you’ve discovered. I believe that it’s important to remember and preserve the tales of the team, to feel connected to what happened before you joined the team and feel that you can build on it.

My first team prided ourselves on drawing a map of Maps for anyone who would listen, with every funny story of how we ended up with dependency cycles, components with the same name besides an underscore, and how it’s tedious to expand the name of TDS. The best kind of decorations are whiteboards that spawn architecture diagrams like weeds that grow richer over time and draw a crowd of interested onlookers to ask questions.

I hope this makes you the loudest team on the floor, debating new ideas with vigor, listening to everyone, and disagreeing technically without fighting personally. I hope you have big ideas and aren’t afraid to try them. That you believe the way things have been until now doesn’t have to stay forever. I hope people are excited about what they’re working on and feel proud of the impact it will have.

I hope you trust that your manager has your back. I hope that they support you if things don’t go to plan, celebrate if you succeed, suggest ideas if you’re stuck, find opportunities if you’re bored, and gather help if you’re overloaded. I hope that if what you really need them to do is simply listen, without judgment and without offering solutions, that they will.

I hope you’re truly partners with your developers. For a long time, I spent half my days sitting with one of my developer teams, the web services, and they quickly stopped worrying that something was broken when I walked up. I bought a token for their weekly build cop—the day before we found out their project was moved to another country. Sid the stuffed spider still sits on my desk to remind me how much we built together.

I hope you have fun with each other as a team and feel comfortable being yourselves together. After all, that’s what teams are for.

And I hope you like puns.

Regards,

Your future teammate