Cross company is awesome but even better would be cross team within the same company. No single thing could do more to break us v. them thinking and silos than this imo
We have an infra rotation program, where application and service programmers can spend a quarter or two working under product infrastructure on whatever their infra passion is. It’s great to see somebody’s passion for a big change boil for a year or two, and then they rotate in and are given the authority to make that change.
That being said, I’d love to see people rotate between application and service teams. Some applications and services are years ahead of others in terms of their maturity and scaling problems/solutions, so there’s a lot of tacit knowledge to be spread. We have a monorepo so self-starters can read code and commit messages, but a formal program would really help accelerate and democratize the knowledge spreading.
Yeah my former company would have benefit a ton from something like this. I guess it takes a culture to make this a thing. Instead we just built abstractions around the “other” team’s product so that we didn’t have to deal with their bugs or tech debt.
That being said, I’d love to see people rotate between application and service teams. Some applications and services are years ahead of others in terms of their maturity and scaling problems/solutions, so there’s a lot of tacit knowledge to be spread. We have a monorepo so self-starters can read code and commit messages, but a formal program would really help accelerate and democratize the knowledge spreading.