Alright, let me tell you about this one time, the whole “eng vs ire” thing wasn’t just a rugby match for me, it was my actual job for a while. We had this project, see, supposed to be a joint effort. Half the team based in England, the other half over in Ireland.
On paper, it sounded great. Best of both worlds, they said. Access to talent pools in both spots. What it actually meant was twice the headache. Honestly, trying to get everyone on the same page was like herding cats. Not just the time difference, which was minimal, obviously, but the whole approach.
I remember spending weeks just trying to sort out the specs. The English side, they wanted everything documented down to the last comma. Full traceability, endless meetings about process. Which, okay, sometimes you need that. But the Irish team? They were more, let’s say, ‘agile’ in the classic sense. More keen to just get coding, figure stuff out as they went. ‘Ah sure, we’ll sort it’ was practically their motto.
The Grind Begins
So you had these two ways of working crashing into each other. The English team lead would send over these massive documents, expecting detailed feedback. The Irish lads would glance at it, say ‘grand’, and then build something slightly different based on their interpretation. Then came the integration phase. Oh boy.
Nothing quite lined up. Debugging sessions were painful. Lots of finger-pointing disguised as polite technical discussion. “Well, our component meets the spec as we understood it,” one side would say. “The specification clearly stated X, Y, Z in section 4, paragraph 3,” the other would retort, probably pulling up the exact document on screen share.
And me? I was stuck in the middle, trying to translate not just the technical bits, but the cultural bits. It felt like I spent half my time managing expectations and smoothing ruffled feathers, and the other half actually trying to write some code.
It got particularly messy around Q3 that year. We had a major deadline looming. Pressure was immense. I was also moving house at the time, boxes everywhere, internet connection dodgy. Trying to mediate a tense conference call while balancing a laptop on a packing crate wasn’t exactly my finest hour. Felt like my personal life chaos was mirroring the project chaos.
Lessons Learned?
What did I learn? Well, I learned that:
- Assumptions kill projects: Assuming everyone reads a spec the same way? Forget it. Assuming everyone agrees on what ‘done’ means? Nope.
- Communication is more than calls: It’s about understanding how the other side works, their pressures, their default ways of doing things.
- ‘Joint effort’ needs careful management: You can’t just throw two teams together and hope for the best. Needs clear roles, clear processes agreed by all, and someone empowered to make final calls.
In the end, we delivered. Late, over budget, and probably shaving a few years off my life expectancy. It wasn’t really about ‘eng’ being better than ‘ire’ or vice versa. It was just… different. Different approaches, different company cultures wrapped up in national stereotypes. And when you force them together without a plan, expect sparks to fly. And not always the good kind.
