Here at Hurricane Labs, we try not to keep our departments totally isolated. We like our developers to have some knowledge in how networks operate, our support engineers to have some sysadmin experience, etc. We accomplish this in quite a few ways, including giving everyone personal hosting space on our network. We recently tried out a new way of doing this that is at least fairly uncommon, if not totally unheard of.

It was a normal day in June at the Hurricane Labs office. I was talking to one of our developers about our new portal, and jokingly (honestly, I was kidding) said that I could write the new portal in a weekend with just one other person helping. (Background note: the new portal is a cursed project that has been passed around in the company for years). He responded that he would be willing to do my job for an entire month if I were going to work on the portal. Well, around that time lunch arrived, so we all laughed about it while we ate, and we decided that the bet was on (of course along with the boss’s approval). The terms? I had exactly 30 days, starting the following morning, to write a new portal that met all of the requirements our boss, Bill, had come up with, including passing a security audit. In exchange, Lebbeous, the developer I’d been speaking to, was going to work on the sysadmin side of things. At the end of the 30 days, the winner of the bet got to decide which job they were going to keep.

And so, the following morning, the bet began. I met with the other developer who had been working on the portal (we fondly refer to him as Golden), and we made a few plans, made a few decisions, and set to work. Meanwhile, Lebbeous was meeting with the other internal admin, discussing what sorts of things needed attention, etc. We were both in for quite an awakening.

As it stands, I did lose the bet. There was a lot of work involved in writing a new portal application from the ground up, even divided between two programmers. Between the two of us in that month, we wrote approximately 10,000 lines of code, integrated five existing applications and one new one, and laid the groundwork for a new portal that we’ll hopefully be opening soon.

However, its really not the code that Lebbeous or I walked away from the experience with. It’s really a deeper understanding of the environment and “duties” of the two job titles. I’m sure this is the case with any company, but at least at Hurricane Labs, every now and then the separate departments forget how important the other departments are. We all think that what we do for the company is most important, what we do is the hardest job of all, and that we could easily do any of the other jobs with our eyes closed. As Lebbeous and I both learned, that is simply never the case.

I would encourage anyone to try something like this out at your place, environment and people permitting. It promotes a totally new sense of “company bonding” and inter-department relationships that will not only improve your image of their job and vice versa, but make the day-to-day cooperation between departments that much easier to handle. It’s an experience you don’t want to miss out on. I promise.