Blinded by Job Titles

Earlier in the project, a Junior Developer switched teams to go work with William. I think the Junior saw it as a prestigious switch because the other team has a cooler name, and instead of myself educating him, he would be educated by William who has the Senior Developer title.

Obviously, I felt William would be a bad influence. One day William came over and moaned about how pointless one of our repositories was. To be fair, I did think it was a bit pointless, but the idea came from a Software Architect.

When this Junior Developer was in my team, he followed the Architect’s wishes and created the repository. He even did the initial implementation of the small library, and even made the changes when we needed to update a schema. At that point, I did challenge if we needed this code in a separate repository given that it is used in only one place. I said we should consolidate it. The Junior didn’t think much of this suggestion.

A few days after William had moaned about it, I was talking to the same Junior Developer about it, and he states “I don’t know why you guys even have that repository; it is rather pointless”.

I was annoyed, because all he had done was just copy William’s point of view. I think it comes down to the fact that I’m not a Senior so my concerns were dismissed, but since William has a Senior role, then his opinion is valid. Even though William mainly talks absolute nonsense, his job title seems to give him much more credibility in the eyes of a Junior.

That’s why it annoys me, because the Junior is just judging by rank instead of judging information based on the validity of the statement.

The Junior didn’t think it was pointless when he created the repository. He didn’t think it was pointless when updating the repository. Then all of a sudden – it is pointless.What I want you to take away from this blog post is that: You get good Seniors, you get bad Seniors. Rate them by their actions, and not by the job title. Don’t automatically accept what the bad ones say. Show respect to low ranking Developers when they say credible things.

“Volunteering”

We have always had a fairly flexible way of working. By default you just have to work 7.5 hours and be in the office 10-4. So the majority of people choose a 9-5 or 8-4 day.

With Coronavirus, we are all working from home, and we have more leeway in order to manage our home situations.

The CEO arranged a call where we could ask questions about the current situation. Rupert, one of the money-grabbing staff members said to him “I appreciate you have allowed people to work fewer hours, but can I take further time out of work to volunteer to help vulnerable people?”.

Basically, he wanted to work shorter work days, but take his full pay. So he ain’t really “volunteering”. It’s more like he will be paid by the company to help the community.

The CEO politely shot him down “No, we need to try and keep the business running”.

Then Rupert does a massive u-turn with his viewpoint and says: “I 100% agree with you, the business must be our top priority and we can’t afford to put our focus elsewhere”.

The audacity to even ask the question in the first place! But that u-turn to try and “save face”! Amazing.

Using Instructions To Make Instructions

William contacts me and says he is reading our instructions of how to deploy an application and there’s some parts he found hard to follow. Which is weird because his team had made several apps, and this wasn’t an issue then.

So I asked him what he is trying to achieve. He says that he is planning on “putting together some instructions for other teams to follow”.

Sometimes I think William is just in my imagination because these situations are like an unbelievable, comedic character. This isn’t “The IT Crowd”, or “The Office”; this is real life.

He is trying to write instructions on how to deploy an application by… reading some instructions on how to deploy an application.

They have already been written. I wrote them, for this very purpose. He is reading them, and plans to write some himself. Why?

This is literally insane.

King Of All Excuses: Part 2

Beavis was the first to start working at home due to the Coronavirus outbreak, but when he should have been ready to return to work, the CEO made the call to send the entire company to work from home until further notice.

Since he doesn’t have to make excuses to work at home, you would think the excuses would stop. But no, they continue:

Day 1: His daughter is ill

Day 2: The schools are closing so he is going to have to arrange some childcare. He didn’t mention why her grandparents couldn’t look after her, but he said ideally he would have gone to his brother…but he has Coronavirus. I wish I would have checked reported cases of Coronavirus at that point to see how likely that was.

Day 3: Apparently he was still looking after his daughter, but could spare the time for the 1 hour meeting. The manager asks to repeat the meeting tomorrow. Everyone in the team can make it; apart from Beavis.

On subsequent days, he ran through a variety of excuses why he couldn’t work at all, or why he could only work limited hours.

Couldn’t work at all:

He was ill
Daughter was ill

Reduced hours:

Windows update took 3 hours, so he had to wait for it to finish. It’s weird that the whole team has Windows and no one else had updates that lasted more than 10 minutes.
Was available to work, but needed to spend time freeing up hard disk space
Was available to work, but his daughter kept climbing on him so was unable to concentrate.

I accept that he has a young daughter, and between him and his wife – they need to look after her. But if his wife has chosen to work, then he needs to take annual leave, or accept unpaid leave. Maybe they should both reduce their hours and alternate the childcare. They need to do something. It affects the team when he is assigned work, he says he can do it, then the next day – he says he couldn’t because his daughter needed attention. It’s not a one-off; it is an excuse 90% of the days.

One of his tasks was to install 2 software programs, and he ended up logging 20 hours against it on the time-sheet. People did encounter issues logging into these programs, but we just told the guy who was in charge of this initiative and left it with him. It’s not like we actually had to spend time diagnosing issues. It should be 2 hours max.

Social Media Policy

We were reminded of the Social Media Policy. I think this is a standard policy these days. We aren’t allowed to defame/criticise my employer online. If we do talk about work online, then we need a statement along the lines of:

“The views I express here are mine alone, and do not represent the views of my employer”

I’ll compromise and update my About page.

This Linux Problem Is Following Me Around

I had a nosey at another team’s Slack channel. There were a few team members complaining that things didn’t work on their machine because the commands were written for Linux and they had Windows.

Why was this a problem now? Their team had been together for a year. Well, a new team member had joined and he had used his “seniority” to introduce some new tech, written it with his Linux laptop and screwed his team over.

Then he replies something along the lines of “I don’t know Windows so I can’t help, but this is frustrating, so someone needs to do something about it because this problem is following me around“.

Well, dude, the problem is you. Stop setting up processes that aren’t compatible with your team members.

What I found interesting was that the complaints weren’t aimed at him. It was like they were following the “don’t hate the player, hate the game” kind of mentality… which I think was just because the developer has a fancy rank and they didn’t want to disrespect him.

It’s definitely his fault, and he should take responsibility to fix it. Maybe use a Windows computer; that is one solution.

Meetings At Your Desk Are A Problem

The Situation: We normally all work in an office, unless someone is working from home, in which case they will remotely connect to meetings. Due to Coronavirus, we are all at home.

One of the high ranking development managers makes an announcement:

I have had feedback from my teams that they are now finding they are at their desks for large parts of the day due to back-to-back meetings.
I recommend starting meetings 5 minutes later, finishing 5 minutes earlier; ensuring a 10 minute break between all meetings.
Additionally, do not book meetings during lunch time. This is more important than ever.
Development Manager

Alright, let’s analyse this statement.

For him and his management team in the usual office scenario: they would be at their desks, then move into a physical meeting room for meetings which happen frequently throughout the day. That means they aren’t just staring at their screens, and also get a walk and change of location.

Due to the lack of meeting rooms (which have been slowly removed from us over time), and due to the fact that the Managers had them booked for all their meetings, Developers would then have to stay at their desk and hold a remote meeting instead. This meant that they are at their desks all day. They are at their desks programming, then stay at their desks for meetings. So this was a problem for most people in the office.

With the Coronovirus, everyone is now at home, and therefore everyone has to have remote meetings. We are all equal now. All the managers are all crying about being sat at their desks all day.

The reason why we (developers only) booked meetings during lunchtime – is when we needed a physical room, and it was the only time managers didn’t book their meetings. If anything, now we are at home due to Coronavirus, I think I don’t care as much about lunchtime meetings because I don’t eat consistently at home.

Do you think things will change when we get back to the office?

Or do you think – since the managers will be fine, they will forget about how the developers have to work at their expense?

WordPress – The 100 Post Special

I probably come across like I hate my job and hate my colleagues, but the truth is that it’s a safe job and has a very laid back culture. Most people are actually really nice and we do feel close to the developers in the close vicinity.

There are plenty of great developers who really know what they are talking about, but that’s not that fun to write about. There’s plenty of other blogs that write about great ideas and genius developers. My blog fills a gap in the market. I’ve read many blogs that describe people’s experience with Imposter Syndrome; where they reach a certain level of success but feel like they didn’t deserve it. I often write about people that have had a certain level of success, but definitely don’t deserve it.

Some people at work occasionally do/say stupid things, and when someone does do something stupid, then it plays on my mind and I probably over-analyse. It’s usually the same several people that I rant about anyway, so it’s more of a minority than a majority.

After ranting to my friends about it, it does feel good, but then I like to put it into text. It’s like a diary of all the good/crazy times and will be great to look back on one day.

I often check the view stats and see no one actually views my blog; which is disheartening. Well, sometimes I get one view now and then. I enjoy writing the blog though, so I carry on anyway. I’m finding it very therapeutic to put my thoughts down. Maybe one day, someone will find it, share a link, and then it could gain traction.

A few weeks back, I got a notification that someone liked one of my blog posts. I check the view counts, eagerly anticipating that 1 view statistic, and ready to bask in its glory.

0 Views.

I think I know why this is. I reckon if you go to my main page and view the blog, then it doesn’t count as a view because you aren’t on a specific page.

I always like using RSS feeds, so there’s loads of blogs I read without contributing to the statistics (since I’m viewing it inside some software). I probably should click through more and show my support, maybe even write a comment of appreciation on occasion.

It probably means a lot to bloggers because it takes a surprising amount of time to write each post. “Likes” and “comments” will encourage them to write more content, and try and write content that their audience enjoys. So if you are reading this, interact with my posts in some way. Also, show appreciation to other bloggers that you like. If I don’t know what audience I’m reaching, maybe your other favourite bloggers don’t know either.