Our new squad looked like the start of a sitcom:
- a self‑taught JavaScript guru who once built a marketing campaign in a weekend,
- a distributed‑systems PhD who quoted Paxos at lunch,
- a former QA analyst making her first jumps into Go,
- and a fresh grad who measured time in memes.
My reflex was to “keep everyone on track” by nit‑picking pull requests down to variable names. Three days in, I realised that hovering turned brilliant adults into anxious typists—and robbed us of their best ideas.
What actually worked
Empathy first
I asked about kids’ daycare pickups, energy peaks, and how each person liked to learn. The answers shaped sprint plans more than any Jira dashboard.Lead by example
I grabbed the gnarliest legacy bug myself, narrated my thinking in Slack, and pushed the first refactor PR. Showing beats telling; the team mirrored the style guide and commit hygiene without a lecture.Team‑wide pairing sessions
Every Thursday we did a “pair‑programming roulette.” Two‑hour blocks, cameras on, one driver, one navigator. Patterns spread, standards converged, and nobody felt lectured—because they helped write the code.
The shift
- Outcome tickets, not line‑by‑line orders—describe why and done, let the engineer choose how.
- Pair to share—sync time isn’t wasted if it replaces ten async misunderstandings.
- Celebrate the different routes—UML sketches, TDD sprints, or white‑board epiphanies all reach the same finish line.
I still love clean code, but I’ve learned it grows best when people feel heard, trusted, and occasionally invited to steer my keyboard too.