Randomness is a superpower
At the beginning of the year, before the human malware breakout, an Italian engineer joined our team straight from university. She has a superpower. Randomness. Along the way I realized just how important randomness is in learning and building a team. Unfortunately, working fully remote is killing that randomness and with it a lot of benefits.
Why randomness matters
Being in a new country, a new company and having to rapidly prove yourself as an engineer in a complex environment with established teams. I can only imagine the roller-coaster that must have been.
When it comes to onboarding and learning, we rely on structure. We have a fixed set of onboarding content about the project, ways of working and the technology. There are fixed points in the development process like refinement, story sizing and pull requests where a lot of learning takes place.
But then there’s randomness. Overhearing a conversation about something you don’t understand, which triggers you to ask or save for a later conversation. Looking at the screen confused, which triggers someone to offer help. Having someone as your rubber ducky when you’re stuck.
And that’s just coding. This extends into other areas, like the people on your team talking about that new movie, or one their hobbies. Or some weird Dutch custom. It gives opportunities to connect with people. Randomness is extremely powerful in someone’s learning process and in building teams.
We should all embrace a bit of randomness
Being quarantined and working fully remote working is important to keep people safe from human malware. And remote working has ample benefits. But that powerful randomness I just talked about. Gone. And it’s positive impact on learning and building teams. Which is unfortunate for engineers on their learning journey or those that recently joined a new team.
So, should we just accept that? No. Never! This is where we go back to randomness being a superpower. My colleague embraced randomness as a basis for a rich life. Never walks the same route anywhere twice, drives to random places and loves talking to random people everywhere she goes.
We won’t be able to recreate unintentional randomness that we get from being in the same room, but we can all put in a little bit of effort to make it happen anyway. Make randomness our collective superpower.
Go into a meeting with a silly background that sparks conversation. Give people a call just to chat. Host a silly meeting about everyone’s favorite coffee mug. Have a board where people post what they learned each week to have ad-hoc knowledge sharing. Befriend people on your favorite gaming platform and play games together. Make sure people know they can call you to rubber ducky just like they would at the office.
These are just some examples. Sure, they take a bit of effort. But it’s fun and they really make an impact. I can’t wait to be back at the office at least a couple of days per week, but until then, let’s unleash the randomness and get the most of remote work. Stay safe, be random.
