Sorting your teammates randomly

Every week, my team has a status meeting where we spend part of the time going around our virtual meeting room getting updates from each team member. To try to keep things fair, my manager attempts to randomly pick the next team member to give his or her update. If she really wanted to be fair, she’d simply run this PowerShell command every week:

"Larry","Moe","Curly","Doc","Sneazy","Grumpy"|sort {random}

Here, I start with an array of my team members.: Larry, Moe, Curly, Doc, Sneazy, and Grumpy. I pipe that array to the Sort-Object cmdlet. The “random” portion of the sort command basically tells the sort to sort the list according to the large random number that is generated. This doesn’t feel completely random to me and I’m not sure it would work well for teams larger than nine people, but it certainly works better than drawing names out of a hat–or the manager’s head, for that matter.

Hat tip to this blog post for the inspiration.