Imposter Syndrome

Some of the Juniors have started to discuss they feel like they have Imposter Syndrome. I was reading about this a few months back. Imposter Syndrome is about feeling like you don’t deserve your current position/achievements. It’s apparently more common with female Software Developers but can happen in other jobs, and affect all genders.

I did write my concerns in a previous blog on “hiring juniors” where I felt it was the wrong decision to hire these Juniors because we weren’t set-up to support them.

There’s plenty of days where things don’t go your way, and you do wonder: if you were a bit better; would you have made more progress that day?

I can only imagine what it is like being a Junior and not having the mentors to support/teach you. If you don’t feel like you are learning and making progress, then it is obvious you are going to question if you deserve your job. Well, I guess I have been in that position. A blog for another day.

The thing is, the requirements for these Juniors were pretty low. It’s not like they are supposed to be good developers. They were hired because they were supposed to have potential, and we would train them to realise this potential. Although we have hired them then basically just ignored them instead. Maybe they feel like they don’t meet our expectations despite them being low. I guess if they are sitting around and not really contributing, then it’s easy to feel like a failure.

I think I have experienced the opposite of the Imposter Syndrome with many developers. Colin and Derek seem to be affected by this. They think they deserve a better role, when I think they are severely under-performing in their role. I’ve probably written about that the most. I guess it is just delusion, but it could be the Dunning–Kruger effect. See this video with David Dunning.

Dunning–Kruger effect with David Dunning himself

This is where you need a certain level of knowledge in a subject to realise how much you do not know, and therefore give an accurate judgment of your own abilities. It seems a weird concept, but there has been studies on this, where 30-40% of people place themselves in the top 5%. People who are dumb are too dumb to realise how dumb they are, so they think they are performing way higher. Interestingly, sometimes people who are very smart can’t judge themselves well either – because they wrongly assume people know what they know. I wonder how much of it goes down to ego too – where people don’t want to admit they aren’t that great to another person.

The Unorganised Handover

There was a reorganisation of teams, so one team had to hand-over their code; do a presentation on the features, set-up etc. The live presentation starts:

“Dean, can you share your screen and do your thing?”
Manager / Meeting Organiser

“I wasn’t doing this one, or wasn’t planning on doing so. I joined the call just to watch.”
Developer

What a great start to a presentation. In the end, another developer just improvised and it was a bit mediocre.

£24 a month Expenses

In the UK, it seems that if you are working at home, you can reclaim around £24 expenses from the government.

Due to Coronavirus, we are working at home, when we would otherwise be working in an office.

A couple of my colleagues were discussing how they are going to claim this money. I reckon, these people are on £35k+ salary, and I reckon they probably save money by being at home. They don’t have to pay for fuel, and save 30-60 mins travel time per day.

You may be thinking: if they are entitled to it and their costs really have gone up, then fair enough.

However, think of the current situation we live in.

There’s all those people that have lost their jobs and are struggling to find new ones, self employed people that have had to close their business, all those people unable to work due to being ill, or isolating as a precaution. I was listening to the news on LBC Radio, and they reckoned “1 in 10 are expected to be unemployed”.

Then these guys are there in their privileged jobs, on high salary (compared to many), and can happily work at home, then demanding an extra £24 from the government which doesn’t mean much to them, but means quite a bit to someone else.

No doubt they are the same people that say “the NHS needs more money”, but are then claiming money they don’t need from the government. If your costs have gone up, and you want to claim, see the advice by Martin Lewis

William Nonsense

While we are all working at home, teams have set up an optional call so we can socialise and try and keep the office banter. I was paired with William’s team. I have quite a few blogs where I comment on how poor William is at communicating; he constantly uses wrong terminology which causes all kinds of confusion.

A team member had suggested we have a main subject of conversation to start off with, so there’s always something to talk about. So we had subjects like “today’s news”, “sports”, “board games” etc. People were suggesting topics for Tuesday and the team agreed on “hobbies”.

It sounds like on Thursday arrange the talk for Friday to be bobbies lol
William

Okay, bobbies is a typo of hobbies. But, why would you phrase the sentence like that? Why not simply “tomorrow’s subject is hobbies”. Why does he need to mention today is Thursday? Why end the sentence with “lol”. It’s just complete nonsense.

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.

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.

Mistake

At lunchtime, I overheard a conversation from the adjacent table. We had a visitor from another office and he was talking about his life to one of the managers; Jackie.

The visitor explained that he had an older brother but there was a 7 year age gap between them. Jackie exclaimed:

“You must have been a mistake!”
Jackie

The “joke” there – is that there’s usually a 1 or 2 year gap between siblings when parents plan to have a couple of children. A larger gap could mean the pregnancy was unplanned.

What an awful thing to say to someone. Even if you knew someone quite well, this seems inappropriate. To say that to someone you have just met; its unfathomable. To say it to someone at work; is probably a sackable offence.

The Great Slack Cull

Hundreds of people were removed from our Slack account for inactivity. This led to a massive backlash of complaints, so many got their accounts reinstated.

The manager that arranged the cull, stated that the analytics showed they didn’t use it, and so he requested to know if they have a reason for wanting an account.

When I checked, some of these people had only posted 20 messages prior. Not sure when they signed up, but it seems like they really weren’t using it, or getting their money’s worth out of it. It costs around £5 per user per month, so that is a waste.

When one person was challenged, he said he was informed it was mandatory to have Slack, yet his office didn’t use it and they preferred to use Microsoft Teams.

What I’d like to know is, why is their office using our department’s budget? They don’t work with us at all; they work on completely different software.

I think Slack is a waste anyway. a) The fact that there was a cull implies they are conscious of the budget and want to cut down, and b) it isn’t necessary for the department to function. We could just use Microsoft Teams which we already pay for.

Rooms

We had a breakout room where we ate food, and took short breaks. This could also be used as an ad-hoc meeting room.

As more people joined the company, people expressed concern that the lack of space will mean the breakout room will be turned into an office. We were assured by the Head of Development that this would never happen.

Within two months, a team moved into the breakout room, meaning you just had to eat at your desk or fight for the small table near the kitchen.

When we moved office, we had a breakout room, in addition to an Innovation Room. Innovation is important and it will never be taken away from us:

you could dedicate some time to learning.
Why not take a book in to read?
You could host training sessions for your team members…

Or it could be used as a temporary office when we ran out of room for desks! That team wasn’t happy when they were in a fairly claustrophobic space, whilst everyone else was in an open-plan office. It also has glass walls, so people could just stare at them and laugh at their misfortune.

A few months later, after that team’s project was complete; the room was reassigned back to an Innovation Room. However, in reality, it was everyone’s second favourite meeting room.

Several months later, our favourite meeting room was then assigned as a permanent office, which means the Innovation Room was promoted to “everyone’s favourite meeting room”. Shortly after that, we lost our breakout room.

The lesson here is that special rooms are never safe.

It wouldn’t surprise me if we get rid of the office and everyone just works at home. It wouldn’t be efficient, but when do they really care about efficiency?

Also, what are we going to do about holding interviews, or other private meetings?