Big brother culture | The Coffeehouse

Jaz
From the depths of Wales I come

Nothing to do with Big Brother the TV series.

How is your development department structured? Do you have developers, senior developers and team leaders much like we do?

When does a developer talk to a senior and a senior to a team leader? when does a developer talk to a team leader? if you have a question about something how do you deal with it. google it for a while, ask someone in the department, sit on your ass?

I woud love to hear your insights.

Dr Herbie
Horses for courses

Small company (5 devs, 3 testers, 2 owners). Flat structure, although some devs are referred to as 'the seniors'. For technical questions we generally just talk to each other. Can work well, but I can get a lot of interruptions when people as questions all day long ...

Herbie

spivonious

Small dev department here too (one group each for the two divisions of the company, about 5 devs per group, although the company has 1000+ employees). We have titles, but they don't mean much except for how long we've been here. (Specialist->Principal Specialist->Senior Specialist).

Technical questions we ask each other and/or google.

figuerres
???

ONE.

ME so i can talk to myself at will Smiley

termbizshorty

I thought it is big brother the tv show...but it is okay we should learn from our culture. Angel

Pace
In The Mix...

In reply to termbizshorty

#Oct 29th @ 8:25 PM

I work with another developer and we have a project manager.

We talk to the PM once a week, or as and when required we can pop in. If we have a question we try to deal with it amongst ourselves, only taking it to the PM if we really need to.

Its structured quite flat and it works for us right now. The PM acts more of a filter than anything, as we have new systems we are working on and legacy systems to support, he decides where the time goes.

I do like to sit on my ass and read blogs / c9 etc...

Read "The Mythical Man Month" its a great read and really relevant to this. You'll enjoy it.

Bas
It finds lightbulbs.

We have three developers and one guy who does "design", meaning that he does CSS and does the majority of the UI design. We have a manager who basically checks how projects are progressing and occasionally fights the people above him for us. It's a pretty flat structure and the four of us basically do the entire development process.

It... doesn't work.