DREWspective

It’s my 26th birthday soon, and this year I plan on doing something. Wish me a good one.

Now, I’ve had one nagging question that has gone unanswered for a long time, and now it’s time for me to air my views. The question is, what is a team?

I’ve had three commercial permanent jobs in the last three years, all lastng less than a year (not proud of it, but possibly a clue that I should take the freelancing route). The main reason for leaving those, beside my personality quirks, is the notion of not being part of a practical, working team.

As I’ve told a recruiter recently, I’ve worked in "gangs" and "dictatorships" before, but not a team. You can accuse me of not being a team player, but that’s because I haven’t had any noticable experience in working in a team - not even in primary or high school.
Anyone can call their employees a team, or call themselves a team player, just like people are designated "leaders". Saying is very different to being.

So what is a team?

Before I answered the question myself, I did a quick search online to see if any other sources agreed. The main quote from Penn State’s Building Blocks for Teams page mirrors my initial reasoning, and explains it in a better way than I ever could:

"A team is a small number of people with complementary skills who are committed to a common purpose, performance goals, and approach for which they are mutually accountable."

- Katzenbach and Smith, 1993

Basically, my idea of a team is:

• a group of people working towards a common goal;
• that have relevant skills among them;
• recognise each other as [important] members;
• take responsibility;
• and has a leader (or leader(s) that leads the team toward the goal.

Some other great links that define what it means to be in a team, and being a team member:

http://www.belbin.com/rte.asp?id=8
http://ezinearticles.com/?What-is-a-Team?&id=328949

You know, just as well nobody reads (or at least, comments) on my weblog entries; this one’s going to be very personal.

I guess you could call me lucky or fortunate, because I’m the type of person who - despite being overweight and out of energy a lot - hasn’t had to stay in a hospital overnight, or for an extended period. I’ve only been in hospital twice that I know of, both for minor surgery.

But I’ve thought about it just now, and I thought about how most people who go to hospital are visited by loved ones, friends and other people they know, all hoping they make some sort of recovery or improvement.

As a patient, I’ve never had that experience of being looked after by caring people. Though I’ve had that kind of treatment, it’s extremely rare compared to my siblings.

The hospital experience kind of ties in with social life, where a "normal" person has friends they can rely on and makes sure they’re okay, providing necessary support when they need it.

This is an area where self-worth and self-esteem come into play, because you have to have it in order to gain that level of support. However, I don’t believe you can have self-esteem or self-worth unless you have it; you’d otherwise be bitter.

I usually tell people that - growing up - I never had a single person in my corner when it mattered.  Nobody came to my defence in a dispute; nobody listened to me until it was too late; nobody was there to provide a shoulder to cry on. Recent years proved that people were more willing than ever to take sides against me, or at least point out just how much of a shit they couldn’t give.  In hindsight, all I was doing was crying out for someone to give a shit.

I’ve said the same thing about shyness and depression: that self-esteem - otherwise, caring about yourself - is a two-way process.  You have to want to do it, but you also have to find people willing to support you with the process for it to be successful. As ER Haas once pointed out, "you can’t go it alone!"

More to come on this subject.

I wanted to share this quote, posted by a YouTube user named DigBreamer:

Deep, eh?

The truth is that failure is not necessarily a bad thing. In fact, failure is one of the most important things we can have, as people who are constantly developing.

Yet, the act of failing is stigmatised beyond proportion. You only have to look at television, movies or even the outside world to see how we - as people - have turned the idea of failure into something humiliating and negative.

One thing I particularly dislike is on game shows, where the winning person/team goes on to win even more prizes, while the "losers" go home with less, or in some cases nothing at all.
And how about these so-called "reality shows", where - even if everybody performs exceptionally well - anyone who doesn’t win is branded a loser. As much as I love Hell’s Kitchen USA, I get irritated by the idea that the losing team in a challenge has to have a "punishment".

Failure on any level is seen as a fault or a weakness by society. If you’re at a club and someone doesn’t find you attractive, in their eyes you’ve "failed" to meet their expectations. If you turn up at an event as anything less than happy, people around you think you’ve "failed" to share everybody’s mood.

Apparently we like to hear about other people’s failures in the media (in the UK, anyway), because we don’t like the fact that some people have succeeded and we haven’t reached their level.

As a growing prodigy, there have been many times in my life where I’ve been laughed at, ridiculed and made an example of just because I did something wrong, or made a mistake. Unforgivable things have been done to me just because I didn’t get things right first time, or all the time. I’m sure you’ve been through similar circumstances, because at some point everybody gets laughed at.

Even more prominent in today’s world is the idea that you have to succeed first time, or you’re a failure and you’ll never succeed.
This is a horrible belief. As many famous and accomplished people would attest, we hear an awful lot about their successes and achievements, but not nearly as much about their failures. For example, Babe Ruth struck out almost twice as many times as he made home runs. Michael Jordan missed several game-winning points. Walt Disney failed to meet anyone’s approval for his Disneyworld idea around 100 times. But these facts aren’t widely talked about. This gives us the false impression that success came to them in an instant, with little to no hard work.

Ultimately we have to remember that failure is an important part of life, no matter how everyone else reacts. Failure - when learned from - can help make you stronger and wiser. Without failure, we can never learn from or appreciate anything.

And there’s no need to worry about failing either, even though it’s incredibly scary and you’re frightened of the reaction you’ll get. As I’ve experienced time and time again, being afraid of failure (or what happens if you fail) only makes you more prone to failing.

It’s not easy to accept that something didn’t go the way you’d planned, and even less so when people are laughing at you and pointing fingers. Take heart, though, that every one of these so-called failures is a stepping stone. Keep trying, and you’ll eventually reach your goal.

Believe it or not, the title text is classed as an acceptable bug report in my current workplace.

I’m not joking; I’ve been sent this so-called bug twice before, albeit not recently. Since then, other equally vague "bug reports" have cropped up.

But I can’t retailiate curse at the people responsible, or throw it back at them with a nice little note saying

this isn’t a bug report; try again

or

could you be more vague, please

because - as usual - I would be seen as a troublemaker. I’ve been accused by the same company of being cynical, as I’ve probably mentioned before.

Why I’m still there is beyond me, but I think I should explain further as to why this is so bad.

First of all, the highly descriptive phrase "not working". Worth a shotgun to the head on its own.

The first question that springs to mind is, what is it that isn’t working?
In many of the offending cases, "not working" didn’t have anything to do with backend code (which I shouldn’t have been touching anyway), but instead was a tiny issue with CSS styling.

The second issue with something this stupid is that it wastes your time. Because you have no idea of what is wrong, you spend valuable time going through the code trying to figure out what it is. How deflated would you be if  you spent half an hour trying to decipher the message, only to find out that it referred to text that wasn’t bold?

I could have asked further questions, of course, but I remind you guys that this company condones such shitty "bug reports". If you allow something to happen, you condone it.

And then there’s "pls fix", to which I would leap from my desk and engage in a street fight.

I guess the main thing here is that I don’t like taking orders, especially from someone who is on the same level or lower (but has somehow been elevated in the company). To take orders from someone a thousand times more clueless, however, is an insult.

Maybe I’d have a little more respect if they actually came up with a solution. I mean, in the case of a style change, "make the font bold" would have given me a clue.

(I’m not a fan of "could you make the font bolder" and "can you space it out a little more" style "bug reports", but they at least give some idea of what I’m looking for.)

I’m not an authority on bug reporting, but there are three things that make up a half-decent report in my book.

• What happened: describe the error and what happens.
• How it happened: what you were doing when the error occurred.
• Background information: this includes things like your browser, browser version, screen resolution etc., i.e. anything useful and relevant to the error.

If you can show me any of those three in "not working, pls fix", I will gladly delete all of my web sites and sell all my earthly belongings.

Just now, at work, I received a "bug" (read: feature request) to add those "are you sure" dialogue boxes to a script.

(If you’re unaware, at the place I’m currently working everything is a "bug". You might work in such a company.)

The prompts would come up when moving and removing items from a category, and it got me thinking;

When are these prompts necessary?

For example, one thing I do straight away on a fresh installation of Windows (after getting the prompt) is to disable the prompt for deleting items to the Recycle Bin. If you delete files one at a time, or in different locations, seeing messages come up frequently can annoy you. When I say delete, I mean delete damnit!

However, there is always a prompt for when I want to delete items permanently; a very critical move, and where I want to be absolutely sure I haven’t made a mistake.

Often, it can feel condescending to be asked if you’re sure you want to close a program or save a file. One good example is in Word, Excel, Photoshop or Illustrator, when you’ve saved a file before printing it - and then get asked if you want to save it again if you close it.

There are some programs that allow you to disable certain prompts, but in my opinion not enough.

I say, when a dialogue box is necessary is mostly up to the user; sometimes they’d just like to get on with things and take responsibility for their actions, while others want to - or have to - be hand held. Either way, there will be those critical occasions where a prompt is necessary.