How to create a good vibes in a team? True story.

November 13, 2023
Reading time: 1 min

There once were two developers, Kolya and Andriy, and they hated each other's guts.

Kolya was an iOS developer, and Andriy was an Android developer. But it wasn't an iOS vs. Android thing (well, maybe a bit). All of us in Smartexe felt they had a lot in common - they were geeking out about apps and thought they were funny…

But, there was some bad blood between the two, and we all felt it. Some old story from the time they studied in the university together...

We didn't like it. We are all about good vibes here in Smartexe. So when we considered doing a team building event, we decided to use the lousy energy between the two for the good.

After some brainstorming, we organized a Stand-up competition. Guess who signed up to participate?

It was funny, it was stupid, but it worked. Eventually, Andriy and Kolya channeled the bad energy into a healthy comedic competitiveness and became friends.

Nowadays, they only fight for laughs, and this is way healthier.

As a reward for you reading the whole post, here's Andriy's joke that won the contest (it's not bad):

"- How many developers does it take to change a lightbulb?
One? Two? Five? … None. It's a hardware problem."

What about you? How do you deal with lousy energy that prevents teams from operating at their total capacity? Are you passionate like us about building and maintaining happy organic teams? Tell us.