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Ask HN: Have you had experience with short term role/team rotations?

3 points by comradesmith ↗ HN
Hi HN. In my company (specialist software) we're thinking about a short term 'foreign exchange' programme, where two members of different teams swap for a sprint or two, to try and understand what goes on in other teams and learn their challenges.

Has anyone here participated in such a short-term exhange? Was it worth your time?

4 comments

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maps7
Haven't done that exactly. What benefits are you hoping for? What negatives do you think it might have?
2rsf
We tried that for a while at Microsoft but a sprint or two are too short to being meaningful results. You should think about what do you want to achieve and how much is needed to actually do that- if the teams uses similar technologies, infrastructure and code base than it is possible to achieve something in short periods of time otherwise it would be a waste of time
giantg2
I think that would only be helpful if you're brining in an expert to consult/swarm on an issue.

We have a rotation program that involves three 6 months rotations for select new hires. The company claims that gives those people exposure to a broader understanding of technology and business use cases. I think that's true. I think it also builds their professional network in the company. This seems to work ok.

muzani
I regularly consult for teams, so I guess that's similar. The big thing going is that it could take a very long time to learn to build something. Even for seniors, it can be a week or more, if there was no focus on onboarding.

However, it's always been very useful. Normally you hear of 'buzzwords' - kotlin, reactive, functional, dependency injection, architectures, all these things, but tutorials give you little to nothing. But once they're used in a project, the value (and downsides) are immediately clear.

It's also useful to learn some things, like how the caching works, why this thing is a bottleneck. Or some habits, like one person has their set of tools and configs which turned out to be really powerful.