Our "Wednesday Wonder" Session Met Silent Mode

Oct 15

Team-building sessions are one of the causes of discomfort for software developers. They take up time, and they require interactions with members of the team that perhaps you don’t even see regarding your work.

I don’t have a problem with them. They’re just a session in the week you have to go to, so I put my best foot forwards.

If you were expecting a session that would be fun, help to familiarise the team and be a good use of a session on no-meeting Wednesday…prepare for your expectations to be challenged.

Charades Met Silent Mode

Since we are a 100% remote company we decided to have the fun session online. We decided to have a charades session! Great!

As one of the few times that people in the company would actually see me with the camera on, I decided to turn my camera on. Of course, I felt that people actually being able to see me would be in the spirit of the team-building session.

The game started. Usually, I’d expect a game of charades to be laughter, chaotic guesses, embarrassing performances…which didn’t happen.

I was the only person with their camera on throughout, as everyone else waited for their “turn” in the game and turned their camera on. I hope that you can already tell the session didn’t work.

In fact, the scrum-master couldn’t even organize whose turn it. In fairness half of the group didn’t turn up, and the other half typed “AFK” into the chat midway through the game and so were not available when it was their turn.

What Went Wrong?

I should have known this would happen. There are two reasons for it: our lack of communication, and our lack of organization.

Communication Issues

This “Wednesday Wonder” session (great name, not) came about after a retro session where simply nobody engaged (including my good self).

The scrum master tried to ask questions. Did we have enough work as a team? Nobody answered. We sat there. How did we feel about the spring? Nothing happened. Nobody said a word. No cameras on.

In my defense, I had no work at all for the sprint. Nothing, and every day I said at stand up “nothing from me” so surely people know. As a result, I could have announced at a retro that I’d had no work to do and perhaps we could (maybe) refine some tickets? I chose to keep quiet as part of my working strategy, as calling out our working practices might (I fear) lead me to being fired).

The solution to this sucky situation was to have a “Wednesday Wonder” session every two weeks.

Organization Issues

I would expect a game to be organized, even if it is “just” charades. That would involve communicating the rules and expectations before the game.

I would expect a rule that all cameras should be on, we shouldn’t talk over each other and so on.

None of this happened, and so we received the dreadful result as explained in this article.

After the game, I vocalized this to myself:

“How hard is it?”

The Great Camera Escape

Turning on a camera has become the equivalent of a poor player stepping up to the plate in baseball. People only do it when they absolutely have to, and you can even see on people’s faces that they’d rather be in the dugout.

If we have a game, we need to be engaged in it, or not do it at all. I find it difficult to enjoy an experience where the only sign of life is occasional:

“Can you hear me?”

“You’re on mute”

People are avoiding switching on their cameras to hide the fact they’re simply not invested.

During this game people were not smiling, they weren’t enjoying the ride. The whole thing was simply misery-personified.

Conclusion

The camera-off charades may have been a bit of a farce, but it highlighted a truth we all secretly acknowledge: most of us are just going through the motions, playing our parts from behind the safe and unseeing eyes of our monitors.

Maybe I’ll suggest the next game. Something we can play silently with cameras off. Perhaps a challenge on LeetCode?

The Secret Developer