Personal Teamwork

Do you every get that queasy, uneasy feeling when you are sitting at your desk, two monitors up, three terminal server sessions, four IDE's pumping, two in debug, one open on the laptop, that you've simply gone beyond the current understanding of software development.  You start to wonder how to keep it all straight, which machine is in the midst of editing which file?  Building parts of the software in one place, shipping it over to another machine with a file copy and running it against pieces built somewhere else, just because you can't do it all in one place?

Do you ever start to chuckle when someone on your 'team' starts to flap their gums about team development practices, source control, inane group dynamic methodologies dreamt up by some university wonk in a last ditch effort to pump out a thesis?  Because you know that nothing of magnitude gets done anymore without a team, but coordinating amongst others is the easy part.  It's the chaos on your own desktop that keeps you up at night.

Matt

Comments

• Anonymous
  September 01, 2004
  I agree, and I'm from the DOS world so I have this weird habit of maximizing every window before I start working on it. My task bar never clutters and my desktop stays clean .. and I know I'm an exception. (Did I mention, I have one 21" screen - thats it !!, though I am considering getting two displays, so I can run TWO programs (not counting winamp etc.)).
  
  In certain ways, us old time programmers are better organized than the newer ones, but then our challenge is to wrap our heads around from procedural->object oriented->declarative programming, and I do see myself surprised writing C++ concepts in my C# programs many times and later on realizing .. hey this worked !!
  
  And every once in a while it is nice to see someone else like me, who maximizes every window he works on - why would you want to repair a car thru it's exhaust (unless you're a gynaecologist).
• Anonymous
  September 01, 2004
  The idea of a project team is getting slightly skewed with a single person becoming a team themselves and having to deal with own mini-departments of their "team" and coordinating efforts with other single-person, multi-department "teams". Teamwork is simply becoming a matter of time managment for schizophrenics.