Object Mentor Blog: Pair Management

Pair Management

Michael Feathers — Mon, 26 Apr 2010 04:52:00 -0500

Every once in a while in life, you get a lucky break. My lucky break was right as I was graduating from college. One of my favorite professors told the class that there were some people interviewing potential hires on campus and they were looking for a programmer. I remember standing dutifully outside his office, in line, waiting for my little mini-interview. When it was my turn, they didn’t see me for a little while – the door stayed closed after they let the last interviewee out. I found out later, that my professor was telling the interviewers that I was the guy that they wanted.

I came in, and showed them some code I’d written outside of schoolwork, and we talked about it. I told them about my passion for programming languages and they said that the job would be at a research department and they needed someone to design and implement a new programming language. I was over the moon. It was my dream job. And, sure enough, it was real. When I was hired, I sat down with my boss and went over ideas for syntax with him, and he pretty much left me alone for a couple of months to design the language, and implement a compiler for it. I was sitting in my first job, with some real responsibility, struggling with YACC, designing a symbol table. It was all very heady.

In retrospect, I was extremely lucky. I not only had more individual trust and responsibility than many developers ever get in their career, I also became part of an extremely good working environment. The guys who hired me, David Lopez de Quintana, and Carlos Perez, also ran the team I was part of. We were a group of about four which eventually grew to about 12. Although, we weren’t working on one big integrated project, we saw ourselves as a team and we had a great cooperative culture. We each had our area of expertise, and most of us were in our 20s, ready to stretch. We tackled all sorts of interesting problems at the intersection of software, mechanics, electronics, optics, physics, chemistry and biology.

About six months into the job, I had an odd experience. Carlos called me to his office and told me he was going to give me my review. I was a bit shocked. The way I understood things, David was actually the guy I worked for, and Carlos headed up part of the team but not my part. Carlos gave me a big smile and said “Yeah, well, you’ve been working for me for the past few months, but we didn’t tell you.”

The review went great and I happily went back to work. I always knew that, on paper we were two different teams, but Dave and Carlos treated us as one big team. We had one big meeting every week or so, and they shared responsibilities and pretty much kept us from having to care about anything outside the work we had to do.

It was a very cool experience. Sometimes, Dave would spend more time outside the team, sort of managing our interface with the rest of the organization. Part of the group wrote software to support research but we had customers outside of our group too. Dave would be off at meetings, and Carlos would handle the day-to-day stuff with our team. Sometimes they reversed the roles. Dave would handle us day to day and Carlos would manage the world outside. The thing is, no one was asking them to allocate responsibilities that way; they just found it a comfortable way of working. It was pair management. Sort of like pair-programming, but at the management level.

The funny thing is that I haven’t seen this much since. Yes, I’ve visited organizations with teams that do something close to this, but it seems like all sorts of forces are aligned against it. The thing which made it work for Dave and Carlos is that they were very good friends. They were hired at the same time in entry-level non-management positions and they rose through the ranks together. They saw each other outside work all the time and joked together at work, making it all a very rich experience. Importantly, their manager never seemed to put them in competition with each other. As I reflect on it more, I think that was the key. Managers are often in competition with each other and that can impede the sort of collaboration and culture that Dave and Carlos built up. They created a wonderful high-performing team. It was one of those once in a lifetime things, and it’s a time that I’ll always remember.

Whenever I think about team health and culture, that first team I joined is my benchmark. I don’t know where the magic came from, but it was there and I think that the culture that Dave and Carlos created with pair management was a very important part of it. In their interactions with each other, they provided a model for us, showing us how to treat each other at work.

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