[dacracot]

> Just as a sports team wins or loses together, so too should the engineering team be treated as the fundamental unit of success.

A sports team has a play book, does your team? A sports team practices together, does your team? A sports team works as a unit, does your team?

Too many times I have see engineering teams as only a team on the org chart In reality they solve tickets as individuals with only a small interaction from pull requests. Otherwise they might as well not even know each other. They are a team not as in basketball or football, but like golf where once you get to the tee, it's you and only you to get the ball in the hole.

[voodootrucker]

> A sports team has a play book, does your team? A sports team practices together, does your team? A sports team works as a unit, does your team?

This is why I like XP. Their teams really are teams like you say.

Though I think in many dev shops you can be team like. Someone might like refactoring and cleanup. Someone else is good at rapid prototyping. Another architecture. Sometimes a great dev is just the one who can take the unglamorous tickets and get them done at a sustainable pace. Or someone who is good at devops, teaching, or morale building. Sometimes just communication.

Everyone has different strengths. No one would ever say "who's the best (American) football player?" because you'd have to ask "who's the best kicker, tight-end, defensive lineman". They are all different roles.

To think that football would have the level of awareness that it cannot be measured as a single dimension makes it sad and laughable that people reduce programming skill down to one most of the time.

[lazyasciiart]

Ha people ask "who's the best football player" all the time! e.g https://www.pledgesports.org/2017/11/the-10-greatest-nfl-pla...

[KineticLensman]

The military get this (usually) and place a lot of emphasis on training a team as a whole. In a tank, for example, the individual crew members train in their specific functional areas (e.g. commander, gunner, driver, loader) and when they have qualified in these, then go on to conduct team training as an integrated crew, which must be passed before the individuals can progress in their careers. In some armies, the individuals get a qualification that shows that they can work in a team context, and then can be flexed into actual operational crews as required. In others, the team is considered to be trained as a unit, and must be retrained when someone leaves / joins.

The military often go beyond team training in a way that very few other organizations do, and conduct 'collective training' that involves multiple teams. Collective training itself has multiple levels - e.g. at the lowest level, two or more tank crews working together in a tactical task (e.g. when four tanks encounter an enemy, which one should engage it?), gradually adding other functions (e.g. infantry, artillery, etc) so that all of the different tactical 'trades' have formal training in how to work together. At these higher levels, the feedback and qualifications are aimed at the units rather than the individual soldiers.

The military are also conscious of group dynamics, for example the 'storming, norming, forming' that occurs when team membership changes, and the effect of 'churn' on a team, as individuals join and leave.

[cambalache]

Not only that but as every sports fan know the compensation in sports team vary tremendously, even for similar "roles". People in tech would be shocked (with reason) if that were the case in the IT world.

[908B64B197]

>> Just as a sports team wins or loses together, so too should the engineering team be treated as the fundamental unit of success.

> A sports team has a play book, does your team? A sports team practices together, does your team? A sports team works as a unit, does your team?

It's a great analogy, but the author should also keep a couple things in mind:

- Out of all the football teams in the world, only 32 can ever win the SuperBowl

- Most of the money is in the SuperBowl (winner takes all)

- Professional athletes are extremely well coached and compensation is extremely competitive

- Professional athletes only train and play: there's support staff for everything else

[chrismcb]

While there is money in the super bowl, most of it isn't and it isn't winner take all.

[babesh]

Baseball

[visarga]

> but like golf where once you get to the tee, it's you and only you to get the ball in the hole

How many times a golf player has demonstrated an idea that upturned the whole field? But this is common place in engineering because it is essentially a creative task.