Triggering the lighting had unintended side effects.

There were already differences in how we viewed segments of the products or which strategy to use. At the time, almost all the team members were either from Epitech or School 42, two very similar universities with very similar philosophies.

Both Loic (a), who was still a student doing an internship, and Florent (b) came from more traditional French engineering universities. They were more square. They wanted good engineering. The rest of the team wanted to push forward, to experiment and see constraints.

Throughout the first year even though we had disagreements we were able to compromise and move forward. From November 2017 to December 2018. However, the lighting strike brought disagreements inside the team in the open.

With time having since flowed and having acquired more experience levels, I can now better see some of the issues.

Instead of matching the team members core strength into areas that matched their strength, we assigned mostly based on interest, availability or will to work on. This created unnecessary frictions where people had to work on things that did not match their unique combination of skills, expertise and personality. At the time, I didn’t see people as different from myself. I thought everyone reasoned the same way. It’s a lesson I learned later on. At the time, I didn’t know better.

The tensions continued to rise, Loic came to me in private asking me to calm the situation, I told him there was nothing I could do. Trust was broken. That is what I truly believed at the time. Had I had more experience back then, we could have found a solution. Rebuilding slowly the trust. Buffering the tensions. Who knows.
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Eventually, Théo (c) made Florent leave the team. It’s a moment that I am not happy about. The lighting strike was the starting of a breaking point. Things slowly started to be different. A seed of distrust was planted. A few months later it would grow more.

Florent joined the compute team and eventually a few months later left Scaleway for other adventures.

Even though I thought of the team as friends, it was complicated. We were a ragged bunch. United in storage but still different. We sometimes would not be good at handling personal issues. Now I am better at this. A lot comes from effort on my side to be better but also a lot of it is help from Djazia.

All in all, we moved forward. Object storage was getting ready for general availability.

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(1) Seed in Mist of Pandaria expansion of World of Warcraft : https://www.wowhead.com/item=85219/ominous-seed​

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(a) Loic Carr, intern at Scaleway at the time, now Senior Software Engineer at AWS

(b) Florent Rivoire, DevOps Engineer at Scaleway at the time, now “very good in his life”

(c) Théotime Rivière, Storage Product Manager then, now Founder of Freedom From Scratch

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If you have missed it, you can read the previous episode here​

To pair with :

• Home - Hybrids minds, Linguistics, Charli P
• House of Suns by Alastair Reynolds