My brother from another mother?

I interviewed for the job Johann has.

Tech Lead at GolfNext — the company that builds the software golf clubs run on: booking a round, the till in the pro shop, the machines out on the practice range. It has been doing that for over a decade, mostly with developers working remotely, and the team that has kept it running has been here far longer than either of us.

I went through the process and I wanted the role. The feedback arrived as two things at once: they were going with somebody else, and they wanted to create a new role for me, because they had been impressed enough not to let it end there. That is not a rejection you get very often.

So the man who got the job I’d applied for became the man I would be working next to. He started on the Monday. I started on the Tuesday — one day behind, which is close enough to zero.

His title is Tech Lead. Mine is Solution Architect and Technical Project Manager. Read those two out loud and try to say where one stops and the other starts. Nobody had drawn that line, and as far as I can tell nobody was planning to.

So I turned up to a job I was genuinely excited about, and inside the excitement was a knot I didn’t say out loud for a while.

On our second day working together, Johann told me we were like twins. He has said it many times since, and it’s become a running joke between us — the title of this post is my half of it. But I want to be honest about what came before the joke.

What I was actually worried about

Four questions, in the order they kept arriving.

Would we agree? Not about tabs and spaces. About the things you can’t do twice: which stack we standardise on, whether you rewrite or refactor, what gets rebuilt first when everything has a claim to being first.

Could we work together at all? I had never met him. Not a former colleague, not a friend of a friend, not someone whose work I’d seen. A stranger with an adjacent mandate and the same start month.

What happens the first time we fundamentally disagree? Two people with overlapping remits and no boundary is fine while they agree. It’s a coin toss the day they don’t, and there’s no process to appeal to, because there is no process.

And the one I didn’t say out loud: was one of us supposed to quit? We had been candidates for the same chair a few weeks earlier, and one of us hadn’t got it. Companies do sometimes hire two senior people into adjacent roles and let the situation resolve itself. Nobody told me that was happening. Nobody told me it wasn’t, either, and in week one you don’t have the standing to ask.

Why that wasn’t paranoia

Two simultaneous senior hires into a small team is an unusual move, and it isn’t obviously a good one. The team already had people who had maintained this software for years. Now it also had two newcomers, arriving a day apart, both of whom were going to have opinions about the technical direction — and neither of whom had earned a single hour of credibility inside the building.

I also came from somewhere that taught me what an unresolved question about who decides does to a codebase over time. I’ve watched decisions collect around whoever has been there longest, and I’ve watched perfectly good ideas quietly fail to happen because they never interested the right two people. Arriving into a place where the deciding was undefined between me and a man I’d never met, my instinct wasn’t optimism. It was: this could go badly, and it could go badly slowly, which is worse.

One thing did work in my favour, and I didn’t expect it. He’d already published a letter to himself on this blog, before his own first day, laying out what he was walking into and the goals he was setting himself. I’ve read it since. Reading somebody’s stated compass before you’ve had a single real conversation with them is a strange kind of head start — you know what they say they want to be like, and you get to watch whether it holds. One line in it does most of the work: hire excellent people, and then trust them. You can’t write that in public and then spend your first month collecting territory.

A month in

We have spent a lot of the last month in front of the same problems: what this estate actually consists of, what has to be true before anything else can happen, what the first real move should be.

The uncomfortable part is that it keeps going the same way. He describes the shape of a problem and it’s the shape I’d have drawn. I bring what I think the first step has to be and it’s the step he’d already picked. Two people forming the same picture of a company neither of them knew a month ago, independently, is either a very good sign or a shared blind spot, and from the inside those look identical.

It also made the credibility question smaller in a way I hadn’t predicted. One newcomer with an opinion about the direction is a newcomer with an opinion. Two newcomers who arrived separately and reached the same conclusion is at least an argument.

So the honest report from the first month is that the thing I was braced for hasn’t happened, and the alignment has been close enough to be faintly suspicious.

What happens instead of disagreement

Within a few days we were quizzing each other on preferences for more or less everything. Tools. Branching. How much process a small team should carry. When you rewrite something and when you leave it alone. What a good pull request looks like. How you treat an estate you didn’t build. The answers kept matching — not roughly, almost every time.

And when we actually work on something, it isn’t a collision. One of us pitches an idea, the other comes back with a suggestion that makes it better, and that version is the one we take. I honestly don’t know whether that counts as disagreeing, and I’ve decided not to care what it’s called, because what comes out the other end is better than what either of us walked in with.

I’m not going to pretend that settles the hard case. A month is not long, and I can’t report from a conflict I haven’t had. But it would be overcorrecting to describe what’s happened so far as conflict merely deferred. It looks like two people upgrading each other’s work, which is a different thing entirely.

The part I hadn’t accounted for is how much easier the job is with a colleague who is exactly as ambitious as you are and pointed in the same direction. I’d braced for a rival. What I have is the person I check my thinking against before it leaves the building.

Different angles, same target

The overlap I was worried about hasn’t materialised either, and not because anybody negotiated it away. We never sat down and divided the territory. It divided itself, by angle of attack.

In practice that means we are usually pointed at the same problem from different sides. One of us is deep in security while the other rewrites the architecture for a big project. One of us takes a large new feature on the payments side while the other is down in a hardware integration. Same destination, two approaches, and almost no surface where we get in each other’s way.

What surprises me is how little coordinating that takes. There’s no standing sync where we carve up the week. We each know roughly what the other is doing and, more importantly, what the other is doing it for, so the split falls out of the work instead of out of a meeting. I’d have predicted the opposite: two people with undefined remits should need constant coordination to stay out of each other’s way.

And that, I think, is what keeps the twins joke alive without either of us maintaining it. We keep arriving at the same conclusion from opposite directions.

Was one of us supposed to quit?

No. And the longer I look at how it was handled, the more I think management made the right call.

Two people came out of that process. Instead of taking one and sending the other away, they took both and built a role for the second — which only makes sense if you are honest about the size of what needs doing. There are more repositories in this company than there are weeks in a year, four products serving real venues, and a decade of technology decisions that were all reasonable when they were made and don’t add up to one coherent estate now. Every part of that needs somebody with time to think about it, and I have not once, in a month, run into a shortage of things to own.

So the thing that looked from the outside like two people competing for one chair turned out to be a company deciding it needed two. The knot I arrived with came from reading it the first way. A month in, the part I’d have called the risk — the two of us — is the part working best.

So: brother from another mother?

Provisionally, yes — with the question mark left where it is on purpose.

A month of turning out to think the same way about a company we both just met is genuinely the best professional surprise I’ve had in years. It’s also only a month. The thing that would actually earn the phrase is the first decision only one of us can make, handled well, with the team watching. Ask me again after that.

What I’d say to anyone walking into the same setup: the worry is reasonable and worth naming out loud earlier than I did. Two senior people with no boundary between them is a real risk, and we get on is not a plan for it. But the failure mode I’d braced for — two newcomers quietly competing over the same ground — needs a shortage to feed on. In a place with this much undone, there isn’t one.

One dissent, for the record

I should correct something, in the interest of accuracy. There is exactly one thing we disagree on.

Our task tracker and our wiki. My position is that they are sub par. Johann’s is that they are absolutely horrible. We have been over it more than once, from opposite directions as usual, and we arrive at the same destination — something has to change — by way of a genuine and so far unresolved difference of opinion about how much contempt is warranted on the way there.

So the record stands. Two newcomers, one undrawn boundary, a month of agreeing about architecture, process, rewrites, branching and what makes a good pull request. And one open dispute, about adjectives.