When Things Go Wrong Work as a Team

In both Software Engineering and Travel things definitely can go wrong. On a large scale people have seen when a combination of IT and Travel issues with Major Airlines and other services have had computer issues that have brought people’s travel to a standstill and caused great stress.

Travel Experiences

In my travels my wife and I have had plenty of issues that have left us stranded and scrambling to find a way to our destination or back home. In 2017 we went to New Mexico and Hurricane Harvey caused major flooding in Houston. We ended up stranded in New Mexico for a week. In 2021 while in Phoenix the “Great Texas Freeze” kept us multiple days from getting home. In the Isle of Man in 2023 our flight was canceled leaving us in the Isle of Man an extra day due to the airport being fogged in. Most recently while visiting beautiful Antigua and Barbuda in the Caribbean our flight was canceled and we were told it would be at least a week before the next flight home. We ended up traveling through 3 different countries, a US territory and faced power outages, Fire Fighter Strikes, and severe weather while getting home. In all these experiences my wife, my family and I all work together as a team to get through the obstacles in front of us. When we were stranded in Antigua my family back home began looking for flight alternatives while I called airlines to switch flights around (from Antigua to San Juan, Puerto Rico) and my wife worked to get hotel arrangements set in the places we were going to need to fly to. My family got me information that helped us find connecting flights, my wife got us booked in a hotel in San Juan and I got all our flights in order with three different airlines (InterCaribbean, Jetblue and Southwest) that took us from Antigua to the British Virgin to San Juan to Orlando, Florida then back home to Houston. In the British Virgin Islands we nearly got stranded due to Fire Fighter Strikes closing the airport after we landed there, we dealt with power outages in San Juan and in Orlando we encountered severe thunderstorms. While it was stressful we worked through all of this as a team including family working with us remotely back in Houston. We got all of our flights and hotels arranged in around an hour all working together. We knew our roles and how it played into the end game of getting home.

When our flight got canceled in the Isle of Man (small country in the Irish Sea between Ireland and the UK) due to fog at their small airport we also started working as a team to find alternative flights and hotel options. We also used another great resource as a local travel guide we had worked with during the trip was more than willing to help us with suggestions and ideas of where we could stay and the best options. Getting expert advice in a crisis can be very helpful as it was for us and we ended up in a wonderful bed and breakfast hotel across from a huge castle from the 1200s!

How can these travel experiences translate to Software Engineering?

In software engineering its rare to have a project that doesn’t have any bugs or issues at all in it. Also if your application is already in production bugs and sometimes severe outages can happen. Throughout my career I have seen things go wrong from time to time and the teams I have worked with over time have responded in different ways. In the past I was working on a major outage of an application over the weekend and I needed the team to come together to solve the issue. In that case my manager did not provide a lot of assistance and few team members joined to help solve the issue. Instead of us working together during a difficult situation to get an application back up it ended up taking much longer for a couple developers to bring the application back up. On the flip side at my current company we ran into an issue with an application and everyone joined together to work towards our goal of fixing the issue. Our scrum master worked to field questions from our users and remove blockers, our solution architect worked to help the developer design the solution and made sure we were adhering to proper compliance and security protocols and the developers and even our interns joined in work the problem. Like my wife, family, local experts and myself has done while traveling when dealing with a problem working as a team is incredibly important if you want to solve the issue quickly and efficiently. If you are working alone flights could sell out, hotels could book up when everyone else is scrambling as well to find a way home. If you want to gain advantage in the technical world its important to foster an environment that is conducive to great teamwork and collaboration. This includes even if you have teams located around the world. In my travel example my parents in Houston were working with us as an integral part of the team thousands of miles away from us in Antigua. With my technical examples the results were very different when comparing a fragmented team with disengaged leadership to a team working as one to complete one goal.

I encourage you in both travel and software development to find a great team of people and work together to help each other. If you start gaining trust with each other and learning how best to collaborate and decide on roles early when a crisis hits you will be ready to handle it and get through it much faster and better!