The Latest in a Long, Long Series of Arguments Between My Boss and Me

Today's version: what's the right way to promote craftsmanship within his department?

For whatever reason, we're not seeing eye to eye on this, or even necessarily understanding each other's stance. Which is kind of an inhibitor to getting anywhere on the topic.

Old habits are dying hard, it seems, and I'd say that we're both guilty of struggling in the new Agile world to use muscles that were developed over years of working in a very top-down, command-and-control fashion (in our own individual ways). To hear us debate this topic, you'd swear that we're both saying the same thing, and yet each of us is sure that we're coming at it differently.

Both of us feel that we're pushing for a bottom-up, grassroots sort of approach that encourages people to show initiative in the area of software craftsmanship so that our department can grow and develop new skills to improve our product and the working environment.

But today was a series of little jabs, back and forth, some in person, some over e-mail, in which he scratched his head over what I was involved with, and I poked fun at what he's doing.

I can't, in good conscience, post details here just yet (although I did score minor points with him in the afternoon by bringing up the fact that his work had not been transparent to those not involved while my small group had tried to be as open as we possibly could, at all times) but maybe sometime when things are a little further along, I'll think it's OK to do so.

At the very least, it's mildly interesting that we could make such a debate out of something that's probably not very far apart at all.