Sometimes in tech it feels like we’re making decisions about technology, but work in tech is done by people with people. And most companies today are also tech companies, even if they like it or not.
A scenario
Imagine a random company which has a successful product. At some point, a decision was made to completely change technologies for a second version of the product. The new technology was better and easier to use to implement the new version of this product.
But there was a catch: very few people in the team knew this technology. And the new version was supposed to be ready yesterday. So a second decision was made: to build this new version of the product with mostly new hires (the new team), while the old version is maintained by the existing team (the old team).
This was announced with great excitement like a great opportunity to build an amazing new version of the product with cool and bleeding edge technologies. Of course, the old version of the product still had to be maintained for a couple of years and that would be handled mostly by the old team. They could transition slowly to work on the new product, if they wanted so.
This was presented as a technology decision.
The old team perspective
The old team would be maintaining the current version of the product, which is being used by customers and brings most of the company’s income.
From where they are standing, the new team working on the new version with new technologies are the cool ones working in the cool stuff, while they are left behind taking care of the old crap. They would not get involved in the new version, because they don’t have the technology knowledge and they don’t have the time to learn it because they need to support the old version.
The leadership perspective
The company leadership thinks that by starting a new team to build the new version of the product, they can move fast without getting slowed down by the problems of the old version. They could do everything from scratch without being caught in the old ways of thinking. No more technical debt and all the bad stuff of the old version of the product.
A more realistic perspective
I believe this way of thinking is very flawed and the company will end burning their whole house down. Here’s why:
The moment they go out with this plan, the old team will feel very undervalued and think that its future is unclear. Any team member that is worth their bread will start thinking at this point about leaving this team, either internally or externally. This is bad, because this team is the one supporting the version of the product that brings money. This team is financing the new version of the product through their work. No old team, no money, no product.
While the old team might not know the new technology, they have a lot of knowledge about the product and the company. This knowledge is more important, in my view, then any benefits that a new technology might bring (unless some really really bad decisions have been made on the old one). So instead of leaving all the people on a dead track, they should have been enabled to lead the transition to the next version of the product. They are the best ones to do so. And it will take time.
But the new team cannot be much faster anyway. Because they need to be hired and learn the details of the product. And since they will not collaborate with people from the old version, they are bound to make some of the old mistakes the other team did in the past. All this while the old team breaks down and the old version of the product ends up in a bad shape, putting in danger the income of the company.
I doubt this still sounds like just a technology decision scenario to anyone. Any decision has an impact on some people and this becomes in fact a people decision. Thinking that it’s only a technology decision might make it feel easier to take, but it is not in reality.