Problem Creep: Muscling Through
Yesterday, I wrote about scope check when solving the local development on-boarding is a problem.
With the answer of local development is not a big problem, or only scoped to the team member and/or is a rare event - such as new team member joining or team member getting a new computer.
The next thing that may happen to make the situation even worse is the team tells the person who has the problem:
If I can get my system working, you can too.
Effectively, putting the team member with the problem on the spot and solves the problem on their own.
This statement also puts the leader in a problem too. Now they cannot dedicate resources to fixing the problem. Overcoming the problem has become a rite of passage to join the team.
This is not fair because tenured members of the team have the system running when it smaller - remember, the problem grew when things were small.
Another problem, for newer members that solve the problem on their own, well, depending on setup, may have different components to their setup.