Splitting engineering teams into defense and offense

Everyone on every team should have something to "own" and feel proud of. You don't "own" anything if you're always on team defense. Following this advice is a sure fire way to have a high churn rate.

Yup, last place I was at I had engineers begging me (PM) to advocate against this, because leadership was all "We're going to form a SEAL team to blaze out [exciting, interesting, new, fun idea/s]. Another team will be on bug fixes."

My team had a bunch of stability work, and bug fixes (and there was a lot of bugs and a lot of tech debt, and very little organizational enthusiasm to fix the latter).

Guess where there morale was, compared to some of the other teams?

From the post:

> At the end of the cycle, we swap.

They swap teams every 2-4 weeks so nobody will always be on team defense.

You didn't read the article did you, they swap every 2 weeks between being on offense and defense.

Splitting a team by interesting/uninteresting work is a comically bad idea. It's puzzling that it ever gets pitched, let alone adopted.

Edit: I mean an ongoing split, not a rotation