Returning and finding everything done is equally suspicious. That’s when you have to take a closer look and discover what spaghetti made it through peer review.
Or worse, it means you’re not as good as you thought you were.
It’s not so bad being the worst player on the team. Just means you have a lot of room for improvement as long as you’re willing to learn. Honestly it’s one of my favorite situations to find myself in. “Oh I suck. How can I get better?”
Sounds good unless you really suck and there is no way for you to improve. I might or might not be speaking from experience.
I’m having that same imposter syndrome feeling right now. But one of the SMEs at work today randomly complained to me about another agent and his lack of caring/learning and thanked me for how I am. So. Sometimes it works out well as long as you’ll listen and learn. You can always learn more it just takes time.
In most crafts, and I consider software development one, there’s rarely no way to improve. The problem arises if the client or the employer wants you to improve too quick, faster than you could, and sometimes faster than even possible.
But to be fair, sometimes developer doesn’t want to improve either
Imposter Syndrome, I choose you!!
Also, all the automated tests were commented out.
Checking the ci logs for the past week, like:
86 test suites passed successfully ❌ 0 failures ✅ 0 success 🤷♂️ 1785 skippedIve heard of stories where people would have an imposed test coverage percentage requirement… and they would just have a single dummy method that printed “.” to the console thousands of times. They then have a single test for that one method, and whenever their codebase grows to big, they add more lines to it so that the dummy method has enough lines to meet the test coverage requirement.
Percentage of lines covered by tests is such a terrible metric.
All metrics are terrible when used for anything other than objective analysis
Yeah, every metric that can be applied automatically ends up becoming useless if people are incentivized to break it
Relevant xkcd
There’s always one. Thanks for finding it ❤️
I once had to go on a longer medical leave, couple of months. In preparation, I documented everything - pages upon pages answering all questions in easily searchable formats. For more than a month, any questions I got were answered with links to specific sections in the documentation, so people would know where to find everything. I put the links everywhere, in total there were at least 200 links to various sections of the documentation throughout all our communication mediums, as well as all information repositories.
After I came back from leave, most of the things I was responsible for were turned off. When I asked why, the response was “we didn’t find your documentation”.
I no longer care whether things keep working.
If you have to explain every fucking thing, it’s good nothing happened
Generally when you go on holiday and do a detailed handover to another dev, you find the team spent the week fighting some crazy fire in prod or sudden shift in priorities from up the chain. Don’t think I’ve ever had them actually complete my work.
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How you gonna take 3 weeks vacation when an iteration is 2?! And how you gonna expect any dev to do anything without a daily stand up??? You need to be more AGILE dude
To be fair, if there’s two people in the team and one of them is a junior, I would’ve expected nothing to be done at all, especially if it’s as long as three weeks
I think, I would’ve left the junior some language or design research, and some questions to ponder about in the meantime, if I were in this situation
We take vacations so our peers learn to cope and our management learns why mentorship is valuable.
Didn’t expected a “Great Teacher Onizuka” meme after all these years but yeah!
Glad to meet a fellow GTO fan
A rare sight indeed! A lot of people use this template without knowing where it’s from.
GTO was/is great.
The question is, was nothing done because they’re incompetent or because they don’t care about the job and were able to do nothing with a “good” excuse
Or because you forgot one very crucial part?
I had that happen to me as a junior. The other seniors weren’t even able to help, so in the end nothing was done. IIRC it was an old python app which the OG author explained the nonsense logic of, but not how to actually run it, or vice versa. Either who the whole project was fucked up
Of course, the assumption was that the senior was actually competent and non-malicious, which may of course be false.
I have a similar story. I started a new job and inherited a ball of mud written in Python while the creator was out for a few weeks. When he got back, he was grumpy about my changes. I guess he preferred it with more bugs 🤷♂️
Yes
You kids today. In my day we used Visual Source Safe and would accidentally leave a critical file checked out when we went on vacation and nobody else could get anything done until we came back.
This is the result of so called tribal knowledge in software development. It’s even worse when the senior citizen who understands everything retires, goes senile, or dies.
Maybe, part of your job is to not touch anything in a random day and observe what happens when something breaks. That way, you can document what’s not being fixed so that your team is more prepared when you’re actually not there.
Sometimes I am happy about the increase in AI assisted coding specifically so junior devs won’t get as stuck without outside help. Very frustrating when they don’t reach out when they struggle, but at least they can privately copypaste into ChatGPT and get ideas. But, still requires a fine toothed comb when you’re doing the review to know if any toilet tier material sprayed out.
