Disable all the services

I was talking to one of our Test Environments Engineers and he was absolutely raging. He said he had spent the entire day looking into a ticket someone logged that stated they could no longer connect to their server.

The Engineer said he was panicking because he thought they had been hit by a malicious virus. All the services on the server had been disabled which is why you couldn’t connect to it by standard means.

After a bit of investigation and quizzing the person that logged the issue, they admitted to some key information. The server had been slow, so they had disabled every single service on the server in an attempt to speed it up…then rebooted it. But since many of the services are vital for the server to function, or at least connect to the server; then the server was pretty dead.

The Engineer was raging that the person that logged it failed to mention this on the ticket, which would have been vital to work out what was wrong and how to fix it. Surely he realised it was his fault that the server was dead, it’s just that he wanted to try and cover up his mistake.

Mid Year Review 2020

Intro

I’m not sure if the “end of year” coincides with the tax year, or if this “mid year” should have been a few months back, but the organisation of our performance reviews has been poor this year.

I think we were supposed to agree on some objectives back in January or something, which got delayed, I think this was mainly due to managers having to decide which crazy criteria we are judged against this time. I have ranted about different ways of evaluating performance, but they usually seem unfair and favour those who love to exaggerate or are a bit dishonest; which isn’t who you want to give pay rises and promotions to.

Anyway, the mid year review was booked in and I pointed out to my line manager that I have no objectives and haven’t prepared anything. Then he said “don’t worry, I’m just gonna free-style it”.

So much for being fair! In previous years we were told the strict process and consistency across the departments was for fairness. Now we have regressed for a pure free-for-all.

However, I’m not complaining because I hate the majority of reviews. I think you do have to be purely subjective when it comes to analysing developers, and I think you have no choice but to judge how well they fit in the team, which the manager should have awareness of. So I have more chance of finally being promoted under this unorganised style.

The Review

So my manager Chris, begins the meeting by explaining that he has got some notes on his own opinions:

“you’re the strongest developer in the team, or you are up there with the best”
Chris

and he has also asked for feedback from my colleagues.

“the biggest problem with working with him, is that he is too good”
Anonymous

“why isn’t he a senior yet?”
Colin

I know that one because Colin had personally called me last week and told me he had questioned it with Chris. No idea why Colin is lobbying for my promotion.

I’m good friends with one of the Software Architects, and he has also been trying to influence Chris on my behalf. So I have 2 people protesting about it which is funny.

‘The promotion is finally here’, I thought. Then Chris starts saying that there’s been a bit of negative feedback too, and it’s my communication.

He said that I’m too cynical and sometimes put a downer on the outlook of the project. I wasn’t sure what he meant at first, but then I later realised that as a joke, when the slightest thing has gone wrong, I do say things like “the project is gonna be cancelled!”. Are people actually taking that seriously? It’s just over-dramatic comedy. Instead of Chris asking “how are your projects doing?”, he always asks “are there any projects on fire?” How is that any different?

I do wonder who doesn’t like my humour, since when I am on calls and say things like that, people in the team do laugh. Given that I write it on a lot of Slack posts, surely people understand it’s just a recurring joke; like a comedy sketch show. There’s plenty of witty humour too, not just recurring phrases. I bet it is Becky or someone with a similar personality because she just seems a bit out of touch with technology, and is a bit too serious. She also asks stupid things so I can be quite snappy in my responses on Slack, so out of everyone in the team, I bet her opinion of me is the lowest. At least I answer her questions, most people don’t even attempt to help.

Chris did say to maybe not joke around so much, apart from when I’m with him because he loves my humour.

Chris also started saying he needs even more evidence of my Senior qualities to take to Senior Management to persuade them of my promotion. Therefore I need to accept more responsibility and take the lead on projects.

I think I argued my case really well. Firstly, I said “how can I lead when we have loads of Seniors in the team?” They should be leading because it is their job to do so. The fact that not many show much leadership anyway means they are underperforming, and also I am held to different criteria. It’s also Chris’ job to decide who works on a particular project. So if I’m never the most senior in the team, then I can’t lead. That’s not my fault.

I also stated that I have been given these challenges like mentoring and I do show senior ability by doing all the Code Reviews, then nothing comes from it, not even a wage rise. He kept on saying he needs evidence to convince the senior management, but I said that he has enough; he had said he regards me as one of the best developers in the team, and realises I was essential in dealing with all the recent urgent fixes that everyone shied away from. He can see that I’m one of the few developers that engages with the conversations on Slack/Teams. What is everyone else doing? Either doing their own work and they don’t care about the rest of the team, or they are simply chilling out.

He did ask why I thought I hadn’t been promoted in the past but others have been. I said others are probably a bit more firm in their demands and threaten to quit if they don’t get what they want, whereas I just get on with things. Also, the way we attempt to measure developer’s performance is just nonsense.

He did say to improve my communication, I need to show more authority and be more firm in my views. So I asked him for a payrise, otherwise I may have to quit!

Result?

It was funny how he said my humour was perceived to be a negative aspect, but I was running the Performance Review like a comedy show. I can’t help myself chipping in the humour. Although there is truth in my demand. If someone joined the company in my role, you can guarantee they would be on equal pay or higher, because I’m somehow still bottom of the salary band. He did promise to look into that.

He did conclude he would sort out my promotion, but when I pressed him on timescales, he refused to comment. No doubt I’ll have to wait another year or something daft.

Mentoring #3

I am mentoring an Apprentice who has never done C# before and this is his first programming job. So this is a diary of some-sort of his progression and my ability to mentor.

I found an example on the Code Review section of Stack Exchange by someone who was writing their very first C# program. I thought it was a good example to give to my Apprentice to test him out.

So I showed him the code, and asked him to explain to me what it was trying to do, if he could suggest improvements or spot any bugs. Basically doing a Code Review.

I thought he explained the code fairly well and struggled in places where the code wasn’t well-written. He did point out one bug and did hint at a few areas of improvement but didn’t seem sure on how exactly to improve it.

I then took him through some changes, and explained how the code could be improved. Most of the code was jammed inside one method so it was 300 lines long. I showed him how you can easily refactor the code into smaller methods using Visual Studio, and how to rename variables (with the advice of choosing descriptive names). The end result is code that is self-describing.

You can read the popular book Clean Code by Robert C Martin which discusses more ideas along these lines.

I told him it’s an important skill to read other developer’s code, since maybe you end up spending 90% of your coding time reading existing code (not sure of the exact statistic there, but it must be high). Also you will be doing it in the code review process.

He seemed to really enjoy it, and was grateful for my tips. I told him I will probably be testing him with more of these challenges, and I also expect to see him put my advice to use in his own code.

All Nighter

After my important bug fix was complete, it needed urgently testing, so a Tester worked overtime on Friday night and Saturday.

During testing, he found a bug, but it was completely unrelated to my fix. Still, he wasn’t to know that, and so when he raised it as an issue, my manager was panicking and trying to contact some developers.

I didn’t see the message until Saturday 11am, but when I logged on and investigated it, I saw another message from my manager to liaise with Colin. Colin loves his overtime so had jumped at the chance to get involved.

When I managed to contact Colin at around 11:45am, he sounded like he was falling asleep. He then told me he was working 10pm to 4am to work out what was happening.

To be fair, he didn’t have the advantage of knowing what the original bug was or the impact of my fix, so I assume he spent a lot of time investigating that. The thing is, the only conclusion he had was that “it wasn’t caused by your change”. I worked that out within 30 mins; I didn’t need 6 hours.

The thing is, there’s no way you can work effectively that late at night; given that you have already done 9-5, and you have it in your mind that it’s now the weekend. To get back in “work-mode” and look at code through the early hours of the morning – it’s just madness.

The thing is, I worked on an important project with Colin a couple of years back. There were major problems with the code which were often caused by Colin. I fixed them during work hours. Colin was spending a few hours extra each night in overtime fixing other problems. He would then turn up late the next day, looking completely tired, and then wrote more crap code… then had to sort it out in overtime. Then it’s an endless cycle. If you want quality code, then overtime is not the answer.

Good Job

There have been a few instances of managers just regurgitating information, but when I think about it, I guess that’s just how the world is. Someone can report back to their manager and the manager has to trust what they say. Then that manager feeds back to their manager, and so on. I guess you can’t expect them to verify all the information. That’s why you have a hierarchy and delegate, and get information fed back to you.

It’s quite funny when it reaches Director level, because I’m sure they literally have no idea what certain things mean because they won’t have more than a basic understanding of how software is developed.

There was a really urgent bug fix, and I volunteered to do it. It wasn’t immediately obvious what the problem was, and I was getting a bit lost trying to debug it. Recreating it was easy, understanding why it wasn’t working was tricky.

Given the urgency, I requested help. I managed to get one of my close colleagues to help. He did point me in the right direction; he pointed out something I had overlooked. Then I came up with the theory of why the bug was occurring, and I was correct. At that point, fixing it was actually trivial.

He had to give feedback to my manager to confirm that he had helped, but he tried to make sure I got credit by saying that I did “a good job”. I know this because he screenshotted the Slack conversation and sent it to me.

I then received a message from my manager stating I had done “a fantastic job”. A day later, the Development Director messages me saying that she understands I have done “a cracking job”.

I love how the adjective basically increased in importance as it went up the chain: good->fantastic->cracking.

I did do a good job from a certain perspective. I did show good decision-making by requesting help to ensure the work was done on time. It definitely worked out for the better.

Also, another developer should have actually picked this work up, but I detected his reluctance. It was one of those where it was quite late in the week, and we had to fix it with some urgency. He didn’t want the pressure/stress and responsibility. I did step up, and it was a bit more complicated than I initially thought, so I definitely mugged myself off there.

I’d like to think I would volunteer for things like this anyway, but I am trying to be the centre of attention in order to force my manager to give me that promotion he hinted at. This has worked well, because the Development Director has been told about it.

Mentoring #2

I think I’ll end up writing loads of blogs about mentoring my new Apprentice. It’s going to be an interesting journey for sure.

He doesn’t know C# or SQL and that’s a prerequisite
He has never used our software before
It’s his first software job so knows nothing of the process

I explained to him that this team is really difficult, but historically, we have always thrown juniors into a team like this, much to the protest of many. This team deals with a wide range of bugs, and often requires good knowledge of requirements, and excellent debugging skills. We also get really tight deadlines, since we are given all the “Major Incidents” which can have 1-3 days deadlines. It’s unfair to put that much pressure on an inexperienced developer.

I told him it’s a “sink or swim” type approach, but strangely I can’t think of anyone that quit. When I was a Junior, we all complained about this, but yet everyone stuck around and became good developers.

I was telling him my long journey into development, and told him it takes years to get good, although maybe I was just slow because I was extremely casual. He reckons he can learn within a few months. I think he is ambitious, but I reckon he can learn like 10 times faster than I did. He can put more effort in, and I can guide him.

I was telling him how I haven’t been given guidance on how to be a mentor, but I can just freestyle it. I told him I’d like to be the mentor that he expected to have. I mean, he is an Apprentice and has been here a year without anyone actually being assigned to him. That is such a classic thing to do: hire people on the promise of training and good things, then they get here and they are never assigned any official training.

August Retrospective

As part of “Agile Development”, you have a meeting called a Retrospective where you look back on things that have happened over a certain time period (like two weeks), and say what happened, what went well, and what didn’t go well.

When we worked in an office, we booked out a meeting room and wrote on Post-It notes and placed them on a whiteboard. Since we are working from home now, we needed an online solution. We used the Retrospective board on Microsoft’s Azure Devops; which worked well.

There were a few interesting points I wanted to note down. One point I strongly agreed with, and the other two points I think either: I am deluded, or the rest of the team are.

“Part time Product Owner”. When our team was formed, we were told our product is really important. If it was important, we would have the correct staff in place, with a Product Owner in charge of providing us with requirements, or making decisions on well-defined requirements. At first, we didn’t have a Product Owner. Then later, we got one, but she was split between two products and we were always low priority. Due to this, some of my work ended up being shelved because I had implemented the requirements I knew about, but I knew there was much more to it, so raised questions that were never answered.

“Need to stop working at pace, otherwise we will all burn out.” This is absolute nonsense; we are so slow. This is basically a reference to what the Head Of Development said in Team Summary, but other managers have used the phrasing “working at pace”, so now people in the team are regurgitating it.

“Code Analysis work going fast” First of all, the people responsible for analysing the data were dragging it out as long as possible, see The Code Analysis Meetings (It’s a great read [if I’m allowed to promote my own blog]). Also, Colin has been leading a small team to actually fix these “problems”.
A) they are making changes manually and progress is slow. The changes are simple, and they can get Visual Studio to fix them without extra input.

B) Colin was taking days to review them, so I ended up stepping in and reviewing the code for him.

Bonus Chuckle

We get to the end of the retro, having gone through the full board. The final stage is to vote on the items that are suggestions on what to “do”/”stop doing” in future.

“I can’t see my items on here”
Becky

It turns out she has added her items to another team’s board. 🤦

I don’t get how we can go through the ENTIRE board and only then does she realise that we haven’t talked about the four items that she added.