I am leaving the team I love
I really like my job, both the people I work with and the company I work for.
Thinking about our team, I have spent a lot of time with these people, working not only with them, but on the same things as they have worked on. I regard many of my colleagues as my friends. We have succeeded together, struggled and suffered together, fought together, laughed together, thought and discussed and debated together. Together we created a really nice space where we can write code, be ourselves, disagree with one another and just do the things healthy teams need to do. This is definitely a team in the performing phase, with a useful, shared mental model and a common understanding of how we want to work.
I have done my best over time to defend the team and our interests and I really hope people know that. Product owners are not our boss, they are our equals, and I have always been happy to remind any of them who have forgotten. Business developers do not own the applications we write, we own them, and whilst we should try our best to do what the business developers want, they are not some foreign sovereign for whom we should wait indefinitely until they can grace us with their presence to decide the most trivial of matters; rather, our team, we, are sovereign.
Our team is commended for our work. We are a mature, productive team, with solid critical thinking skills, hard-earned wisdom and a collaborative approach to problem solving. Senior managers have quipped that if there's one team they do not have to worry about, it's our team, and that surprises me not one iota.
We are a fucking excellent team, the best team! I am sad to be leaving it, but very glad to be leaving it in such great shape. I leave only because I am emigrating, and cannot take you with me.
Thank you to you all, teammates and colleagues alike, for all the fun. All I ever want is to smile and laugh and enjoy, and we did a lot of that, even if sardonically about corporate bureaucracies or absurdly bad code.