I thought about adding this to the Workplace griping thread in the pit, but I would really prefer advice to commiseration. Apologies for the tome.
There are two companies in my building owned by the same guy - we’ll call them CompanyA and CompanyB. CompanyA has been around for 15 years or so, and is pretty established. There’s a VP of Development, with a team of programmers (including me), a VP of Sales, with a team of sales people, and a Director of Production with an ops team, which handles manual processes (like stuffing envelopes and the like). If there’s a problem, someone just walks to the person that has the answer and asks, or they look up the solution in the notes they wrote from last time. While there are hiccups, everyone is basically on the same page and it all goes smoothly.
CompanyB is a different story. They also have a VP of sales with a sales team, and a VP of ops with an Ops team, but rather than have a development team also, the owner of both companies rents the developers from CompanyA to CompanyB as needed. Unfortunately, they don’t all seem to be on the same page in CompanyB. The VP of ops thinks ops work is beneath him (why did he take a job as VP ops? no idea), so he hired an ops manager. Who he never talks to, and she never talks to him. He also thinks the sales guy is an idiot, and is always trying to go over his head to make a sale with a new customer so he looks good (current success rate: 0%). That’s not to say the sales guy is great: he keeps coming up with grandiose schemes that fall through, or promises the world to a customer, which we end up losing money on because he promised tons of stuff for free. We had a good project manager over there, that was good at setting customer expectations and getting requirements laid out for development, for he quit for greener pastures (most of us this he wanted to work someplace that wasn’t dysfunctional). The VP ops replaced him with a yes-man, who knows absolutely nothing about the business and hasn’t been trained on anything.
As you can imagine, development tries to stay out of this mess as much as possible. But it doesn’t always work - sometimes the VP Ops will get some crazy idea into his head and demand development drop everything to get him a fancy new tool to try and control the operations workflow - and then it’s never used because he didn’t really need it. Or there will be a tool the ops team really needs, and he’ll give a long list of specifications for, but after we deliver it the ops manager comes by and says it doesn’t do half the things she need and does a lot of stuff she didn’t need. So we have to do a lot of rework. Or the VP of Ops will come up with some other idea, then change his mind to whatever requires less work on his part, then change his mind again…
Needless to say, CompanyB is a hot mess. So much so, the ops manager threw a pizza party to work on communication (which has become a running joke among developers). Of course, we didn’t know what it was for ahead of time, because communication is not anyone at CompanyB’s strong suit. At the meeting, the developers tried to bend over backwards to accommodate them - they said they never know who did what, so they call a random developer for help, so we made (and maintain) a webpage on our intranet listing all the applications we support and who wrote them. They said they never know when things change, so we made another webpage on our intranet to maintain a change log (this is in addition to the weekly meeting we have with the VP of ops to let him know everything that changed). They complained that we don’t tell them all the nitty gritty of our debugging when there’s a problem, so we promised to include them on the internal mailings when we discuss an issue (despite them admitting they have no idea what we’re talking about, they like to see the traffic).
Of course, this hasn’t helped anything. They don’t look at the internal webpages we set up for them; in fact they get mad we refer them there for something. They get mad if we email them with technical jargon, saying we’re being curt and talking over their heads. If we email them explaining in laymen’s terms, they complain that we ramble on too much and sound condescending. Of course, the VP, manager, and yesman are still not talking to each other, so if we have to explain something, we have to explain it three times. And usually, more than that, because they all have the memory of a goldfish and we have to explain how to handle any errors on an app every. time. one. happens. (You could argue that the applications should have better error messages or error handling so they don’t have to get involved. Development would agree, but we can’t get authorization to improve their apps because that costs money. And we’re too busy working on the VP’s newest wacky scheme…)
Last week, the VP of development called a meeting with the developers, saying that the team at companyB was complaining to him that the developers “aren’t acting nice”. When we asked what the fuck that meant, he said he didn’t really know either, but they are bitching at him every other day about it. When we pointed out that the other team is, at best, dysfunctional, he said “I know, I know, but… I don’t want to get bitched at anymore”. So now instead of dashing off an email with “finished task whatever” like adults, all our emails are “Dear so-and-so, I finished that task for you, have a nice day, <name>” like we’re back in grade school. This of course has not fixed their communication problem, inability to read documentation, or memory about how to troubleshoot something before asking development.
I said at the beginning that this was supposed to be asking for advice and not a rant, so I suppose I should actually ask for advice. I’m just one of the developers - not a VP or manager or anything. But, I am one of the senior developers, so I worked on a lot of their systems and field more than my fair share of requests. And I’m at a loss for what to do. Just keep on keepin’ on seems to piss them off. Writing documentation seems to piss them off. Concise emails seem to piss them off as much as verbose ones. What am I supposed to do?! The good news is that my VP understands 90% of the problems are on the other side of the fence, but he’s a good guy and I’d rather help him out instead of kicking it upstairs every time things go pear-shaped.
(PS> I know I’ve painted a gloomy picture, but I actually really like working there - the fellow devs are pretty great, the commute is short, the pay is good, I get my own office, the work is interesting (when specs are nailed down…), so I don’t want to leave. I just, like many other developers, don’t have the soft skills to sort this issue out. So here I am on the Dope!)
TL;DR: Other team at work is dysfunctional, and it bleeds over into my team’s work. How best to handle a pissed off team that doesn’t communicate with itself?
