Change to avoid change

Where I work, we go for long periods with barely anyone leaving the business, then we seem to be hit with several at once. There’s been a few people leave recently when we announced we would switch from the standard Agile process to SAFe.

With this restructuring, some roles did change but I think it was mainly people that weren’t affected like Software Developers.

I was talking to one of my colleagues, and he said 

“Why are people leaving? it sounds like we will still be using the same technologies”

Developer

The thing is, Developers will leave if you make them use different languages, and Developers will leave because they want to learn something new, so you cannot win.

I think some people may be leaving because they don’t believe our new software will ever get finished, then they have used the news of the process change as a final trigger to leave.

It seems quite stupid to me though – a change in management/process often makes people leave, even though leaving means you are dealing with a new management/process anyway in your new company.

It happened when we moved from Waterfall development to Agile. It also happened when we moved offices, and we have moved 3 times; even though it’s always been 10 minutes walk at most to the new location. If you come by car, it’s not even a problem unless the parking situation is different.

“OMG IT IS DOWN THE ROAD, I AM LEAVING to an office further away”

Stupid staff member

I remember with one office move, I was in the new office kitchen and talking to a Developer who was leaving. He said “I’m sick of these office moves”. I pointed out that we were literally standing in the new office, so he has already gone through the hassle of moving. He said he was only here because he had to serve his 3 month notice period. Yet he was moving to a new job that was probably further away from his house, and would more likely to have more job pressure because it’s very relaxed where I work. Also, since we had moved office, you could essentially guarantee we would stay there for at least 2 years because of the building lease. At a new job, you will more likely have to move offices within that time period.

In my mind, a change should be an encouraging aspect to make you stay, unless one of the changes has a negative impact on why you liked the job. In my experience, it seems a lot of people don’t see it that way.

General Update For The Last Few Weeks

I haven’t written a blog in a while but I do have pages of ideas that I need to flesh out. Some of them I could probably finish if I dedicated some time to them, whereas others need some more ideas to make them interesting. I’ve got various code samples and funny quotes too.

So let’s discuss what has happened over the last few weeks in the crazy world of software engineering.

In our new team structures, we were told that the teams could be quite flexible so people would move teams frequently, which really goes against what makes a successful team. Surely you can’t have much team cohesion when staff are constantly being reassigned. We were also told that each team would have a Tech Lead who would be permanent (which I was). However, a few weeks later, another Senior joined and was instantly assigned the Tech Lead, then a few weeks later, I then moved teams. So maybe the Tech Leads don’t move teams, but can be demoted – then moved! 

Recently, all the changes that have happened seem random and we don’t get an explanation of manager’s decisions. However, the person that I replaced in my new team specifically asked to move teams. The thing is, he has reasons why he didn’t like this team and moving me into it isn’t going to change things. He mentioned that there’s 2 people that often argue, there’s a lack of developers, and the developers they do have often tried to get him to do their work.

I mentioned in Mentoring #5 that I wasn’t working with my Apprentice anymore, but now I am. This is one reason why there’s a lack of developers because he isn’t at a level to do proper work.

After a few days in the team, I was invited to their “Retrospective” meeting. I looked through their notes for their previous meetings and they had previously discussed the amount of turnover in their teams, so I brought it back up for discussion. A week later, the Product Owner switched teams.

I think the 2 people that often argue was the Product Owner and the Senior Tester, so maybe that issue has been resolved now.

I keep being asked to do everything. We seem to have loads of projects planned but I don’t see how we can do them given we don’t have enough developers and can’t do multiple projects at once. I end up attending meetings, then am asked to try to estimate the size, then have to fix urgent bugs, help people with various stuff, and do code reviews.

One day, I think 3 hours went by before I even started thinking about writing some code. I said to my Apprentice that I just don’t have time to start proper work. He said he hadn’t done anything either because after the Daily Standup meeting, he decided he wanted a second breakfast! I really don’t get it. I told him stories of developers like Derek that took so many breaks, he only worked 4 hours when he was supposed to work 7.5, and my Apprentice seems to be going down that path. He ends up starting late because he sleeps in, he likes an hour lunch because he likes eating, then finishes early because he needs to pick up his kid from school, but then can’t work because he has to look after his kid. So he probably works 4 or 4.5 hours. I’ve mentioned in previous blogs that I understand people have personal circumstances and it’s possible you could be very efficient and get your work done in half the time – so it’s not really a problem if you literally work half the time you are paid for. But in this case, I see nothing from him.

Dealing with Software Support

I was invited to a call with some of our users who wanted to explain some of the problems they had in a particular feature of our software. One of the problems was actually an issue with a massively-popular 3rd-party software we integrate with, so they wanted me to log a bug with the 3rd-party on their behalf.

A reasonable request I thought, but I really didn’t want to have loads of phone calls/email chains back-and-forth with support. I just wanted to log it and forget about it. Luckily, I am a developer so I have a good understanding of all the information Support/Development would want.

This company that I logged the bug report with must be one of the Top 10 software companies in the world. So you’d expect their Support to be of a high standard. Due to the fact that the bug report is still open at the time of writing, I’d better keep their identity a secret, otherwise they could easily look up my name from the bug report and my anonymity is blown.

The feature is that you click a button, then their software will open a dialog with some data pre-filled in. If their software is currently closed, it still opens the dialog (their software is just temporarily open). In this scenario, when you save/close, then their software is supposed to close back down completely. However, it was getting stuck and you had to use Task Manager to kill it. This problem can be recreated consistently every time.

So I put together a great description of the problem, the recreation steps, the version of Windows, the exact version of their software I was using. I told them our users have recently upgraded from ‘X’ edition to ‘Z’ edition; and I was using ‘Y’ edition and can now see the problem after installing ‘Z’ edition so the problem is definitely in this new edition. Since I didn’t want to provide them with our software to recreate the issue, I even found some of their software with a similar feature and recreated it on there too. But to make sure they definitely didn’t consider it to be a problem with our software, or their other software product, I found another 3rd-party, free-to-use software and recreated it there too.

So I’d say they have a 100% chance of recreating that themselves, and I had proven it was a problem with their latest iteration of software. 

Within an hour, I get an email asking questions. So it seems I failed to provide them the information required:

  • What version of Windows are you using?
  • What exact version of our software are you using
  • When was the feature last seen working?

I had literally given him all those answers. So I reworded my original report and put them in bullet points. He then mails back saying he cannot recreate it and would like a demo. Unbelievable. I can recreate it everytime, our users can recreate it every time. It’s not a Windows issue because I was using Windows 8 and our complaining users are using Windows 10.

He specifies that the demo must be on Windows 10. Why? Is he just trying to mess me about? You can’t expect someone to have access to various computers. The version of Windows is irrelevant.

Regardless, I accept and I set up a Virtual Machine. It’s like a fresh computer install so maybe it is better than my work computer to prove this is a bug. I put their software on it, even created a brand new account. However, now my user doesn’t have the Premium licence but I accept the trial, so had 14 days. I can recreate it every time. Surely he hasn’t tried hard.

So I arrange the call, share my screen and I demo the feature to him. I ask if he did the exact same thing. He then tells me the main difference was that he was using the very latest version. Is he trying to wind me up? I told him the exact version, he asked for the version, then didn’t use it! Surely if he couldn’t recreate it on the latest version, then he could have checked on the version I was using; then rejected the bug as fixed. Instead, I waste an hour configuring the Virtual Machine and another 30 mins demoing it to him.

He was supposed to send me instructions on how to update because it wasn’t as simple as clicking a button. However, he didn’t bother and I found the instructions after some Googling. He was right that it was fixed…or kind of. I tested it several times and I saw the same issue again. So I tried some more and it worked for maybe 30 times then failed. So it’s intermittent. So I tell him it’s not perfect. He wants another demo because he can’t recreate it.

So I demo the problem and he said he cannot help because he noticed I’m “not using the Premium account” and he is in the Premium support team. I told him I do have a licence, I was just using this account to rule out if it was a problem if you had a large user profile: basically doing his investigation for him.

However, I have to deploy a new Virtual Machine since the settings don’t allow me to sign in (seems to be some restriction from our IT department). So after setting up yet another Virtual Machine and signing in with my work account (with the Premium licence), I do another demo. However, the intermittent nature means the issue didn’t happen and the meeting had already lasted 20 mins. I was pretty bored clicking a button and closing a dialog for that length of time. So I said if I had time, I’ll try and record it happening, but in the meantime, I’ll send him the recordings I had from before (with the Standard account).

After a few days, he says that he is going to log a ticket with the Microsoft Windows 8 Support Team, so I ask him why. It doesn’t make sense when the issue occurs on both Windows 8 and Windows 10. He said it was because it only happens on Windows 8 since I had demoed it working on Windows 10. I told him again that I have recreated the issue with the latest software on both Windows 8 and 10, and using 2 different user accounts. The recordings I sent him were Windows 10. It was just that the issue was intermittent and coincidentally worked during the time I was demoing it.

He apologises for the misunderstanding and would need some time with his ‘senior’ to come up with the way forward. A few days later, he says that his senior wants me to arrange another call to test out some scenarios. I told him I didn’t understand what the plan was. He apologises for the misunderstanding, but there’s some scenarios that we need to test. I told him I didn’t understand what the plan was: am I doing a demo? or am I watching them do a demo? He apologises for the misunderstanding, but he wants me to deploy another Virtual Machine and create a new user and demo this to them. Surely, I needed to know that and set up a Virtual Machine and new user account before we start the call. It would have been a bit awkward if I set up the call, he asks me to demo it on a machine I wasn’t logged into and with a user I hadn’t even created.

I told him I didn’t understand what the plan was. Why do I need yet another Virtual Machine and user account when I recreated the issue already using 2 accounts, 1 Windows 8 physical machine and 2 Windows 10 Virtual Machines? He said they had attempted to recreate the issue with multiple users and on different Virtual Machines, but since the problem seems to exist on my Standard account, then he would like me to verify it on another Standard account.

Let’s recap: when he concluded it was a Windows 8 issue, I told him it wasn’t because I’d recreated it on Windows 10. It seemed that me demoing the feature working on Windows 10 was the thing that he picked up on, and completely disregarded everything I wrote and said. I had told him on that call it was intermittent and I had seen it fail that same day on the same Virtual Machine. Now we are in a situation where I had told him I had recreated it with multiple users, but he is still thinking of that demo I did where it was working. Not only was it Windows 10, but I was using my Premium account at the time. So now he has this idea that the problem is with my Standard account.

I think I need to take him to a hypnotist to train him to forget the existence of that demo. What’s he going to claim next? That because he saw it working on a Friday, then it’s a Monday to Thursday issue?

My dream of just logging the issue and them instantly confirming the bug was completely ruined. 

It’s dragged out for a month or something daft and I feel like I have invested weeks of time investigating it. This is literally his job and I am doing his work and telling him how to do his job. It’s ridiculous. 

I keep saying to my colleagues that it seems that he is trained to mess people about so they drop the issue then they don’t have to fix anything. It’s a bizarre strategy, but what other logical explanation is there for his behaviour?

I like our system: Regardless of whether Support can or cannot recreate the issue, the bug gets prioritised based on what they know. If it is deemed high priority then it will get sent to Development, otherwise probably gets thrown on the backlog and we might look at it in a year… or never. But I think the key aspect is that we always believe our users, so it does get logged (“the customer is always right”). Well, I guess we get evidence like a video or screenshot, but I had already provided those – and we would never dismiss video evidence. 

As a side note: I wish that low priority bugs were dealt with faster because it will discourage users from reporting them if they think we will ignore it for a year. Maybe they can be given to Junior Developers to clear down.

Major Incident With Comms

that awkward moment when there is a Major Incident, but there is also an Major Incident with the Comms system

When there is a Major Incident with our software, we send out emails to the affected customers. However, our Mailing provider, Mail Chimp had blocked our account without warning – apparently we were now violating their terms of service.

Since we couldn’t send out these emails regarding a Major Incident, we then declared a Major Incident.

Software Developer Wages

In my recent Promotion Special blog, I discussed how I was underpaid by my employer and I am going to end up with £12k extra for doing exactly the same job as before.

When I have looked at Job Adverts for developer roles of my level of experience, it seems I could possibly get an extra £5k-10k if I went elsewhere (~£50k). However most of these adverts seem to imply I would need to learn a few more programming languages and could have extra responsibilities like line management, or dealing with Senior Managers, possibly even relocate. It’s not worth it.

My first job out of uni was £18k and that was a hybrid role of Tech Support and Junior Software Engineer – I additionally spent a fortune in travel costs (I think it was like £80 per week). Last year, we hired loads of Apprentices so I thought they could be on about £18k, but when I stated that to my Apprentice, he said it was £23k. I couldn’t believe it. That was my salary when I was about 25 and I had to work hard for that. These youths have it easy these days.

The thing is, we got these Apprentices via a Bootcamp company so we pay the Bootcamp a premium too for commission. It’s bizarre, because we are well known to be cheap, so why are we paying a 3rd party, and giving a high salary to unskilled developers. Mental.

Quite often when you watch Youtube videos or read blogs, Americans often come up with salaries like $100k+. I think there was one video that said a Google salary was $230k – mental). I guess you need to take into account what a dollar means over there – ie cost of living; but these figures do sound crazy. You can look at jobs in London, England and you can easily see £60k-100k, or sometimes even more if you know an obscure language where the “supply” of developers is limited so you can demand a premium. 

These wages can be misleading though. I have a friend that is a Senior Software Developer and his partner is a Lawyer. I went to stay at their house in Bermondsey, central London, and expected he was living the high-life, but he lived in a rough-looking area in an apartment block. It was cramped and looked quite dark and drab. I don’t remember the exact figure, but he said it cost something like £1600 per month in rent alone.

Recently at work, we had a casual chat and talked about wages. One Tester sounded a bit outraged at the wages we pay and she said “Testers should be paid as much as developers”. I strongly disagree with this. I think Manual Testers really could earn £30,000 max. I used to be a Tester and for the most part, I see it as low skilled. Maybe the best testers like myself (arrogant) use better analytical skills, and can read the code and understand how to possibly find gaps and therefore find the most bugs. However, most Testers I work with don’t really think and they just do what you tell them. So it mainly involves mindlessly clicking buttons in the UI.

Anyway, this outraged Tester then stated she didn’t mind disclosing her salary and she gets paid £40,500 for a Senior Tester – which is going to be higher than many developers! Senior Developer wages start at £39,000 where I work, and I was under the impression that Senior Testers were more like £32k. How she managed to wrangle that wage is anyone’s guess. Why she thinks she deserves more is even more baffling.

Crisis Meeting

Apparently my employer has recently made a big deal and sold our software to a large group of users, but the users now want to reverse their decision based on other customer’s opinions of our software. Not sure why this group of customers only found out these opinions after making the deal.

We had a meeting with the new Head Of Development to discuss what we can do about it. The overall aim is that we need to repair our reputation: fixing major bugs, improving performance, improving the user experience in general, and making it clear to our customers that we value their opinion.

He initially stated that he wants more bug fixes, especially performance improvements and delivered in smaller, but frequent releases. He states that the current process doesn’t work and we should ignore it and come up with a new one.

Sounds great in principle, and a desired philosophy of Agile Development. However, Release Management stated it wasn’t possible to update the entire customer-base so quickly. This is partially due to the way some users work, and some contractual obligations. Both of these problems pretty much come down to the idea of essentially wanting close to zero downtime, so they want to choose a specific time to accept our updates, and they like this to be around once a month.

So the discussion turned to the development side. It seemed we were in agreement that we need higher-skilled staff to target these important bugs (we love throwing Juniors at these important issues), and we would also like to work in Domain based teams. Examples of this team idea is that you’d have one team that exclusively handles the Reporting module, and another handles Registration module etc. This way you can have a fuller understanding of all the configuration, features and the codebase; so can fix/enhance the software faster. Essentially you specialise, rather than going with the jack-of-all-trades master-of-none style. We also wanted more Testers since some teams have produced a lot of fixes recently but the Testers couldn’t get through it. To be honest, I expected that some Testers were just working slow and the fix isn’t necessarily to throw more staff members at the problem (just have a stern word).

The response from the Head of Development was that “the business” has decided on the team sizes and who is in those teams – and they won’t change. 

So to summarise – we are asked how we can make dramatic changes to the way we work, ignoring the current process… then get told we can’t do our ideas. We’d shot-down his suggestion, then he shoots down ours.

I think he shot down our suggestion because he is too focussed on the current process and structure, and he isn’t taking his own advice by ignoring it and coming up with a new idea. To be honest, it is easier said than done, and I think his way of thinking is – how to preserve the current in-flight projects? You can’t simply restructure the entire department without dealing with the current projects.

What you can do is just make the current project teams bigger and let them take the project and some bug fixes. With a bigger team, they can easily carry on with their project work, and with the extra people, they take on live Bugs, fixing “Technical Debt”, adding more automated tests etc.

I get confused how we get told these “Service Improvement” teams (teams that deal with bug fixes only) are the most important, yet it’s the Project teams that get the most experienced developers and the most attention. He has limited the “Service Improvement” teams to 20 developers with only 4 with Senior rank, one of which isn’t good enough to be Senior. Then most of the other developers are essentially Juniors. 

How can you deal with important bugs with a lack of talent? It’s frustrating that he arranges a meeting to ask how we can solve our way of working, but then he doesn’t listen to the feedback.

If he wants a quality product and to deliver faster, then we need the staff and process to actually achieve it.

Mentoring #5

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 haven’t written about my Apprentice in detail for a while – it’s been 4 months!

The bad thing is that there’s no good news to talk about, but I can sure rant about him instead. I’ve spent a lot of time with him over the past year, giving him general advice based on my journey as a developer and telling some great stories. I’ve explained what I think makes a good developer, emphasising how it is fundamental to know how to debug effectively, and how you need to find the root cause of an issue rather than papering over the cracks. 

When a batch of Apprentices joined the company, we had no plan for them, so managers passed them between teams aimlessly. When he joined my team, I promised him I would put in the effort and be the mentor he expected to have when he joined. So I can help him reach whatever potential he has, but he needs to put in the effort to get there; I can just get him there faster. I said he can ask as many dumb questions in the first year, but after that, then I will judge him.

I’ve given him exam questions, a pdf book, a list of project ideas I spent a few hours writing, a list of easy bugs to fix, and I frequently send him code samples to discuss. I’ve even made some basic programs and set the challenge to enhance them. I’ve done live coding demos, talking him through how to make a noughts-and-crosses game. I said I would code review anything he sends me.

I told him that it’s not mandatory to do everything I send him, because people learn in different ways, but he needs to put the effort in to do something. Maybe he doesn’t like reading and prefers watching videos? The key thing is just to get writing code.

However, with my Apprentice, he has been with me a year, and yet has basically nothing to show for it. He just seems to make excuses and somehow time has flown by.

I did get another Apprentice assigned to me. He did the exam questions within a couple of days. He made his own Battleships program in the following week, he completed a few easy bugs in the weeks following that. Then he moved teams, but I thought he was probably ready for proper work. He did seem far more naturally gifted, but he also had the high determination and took all my advice and instructions on board. I couldn’t have been happier with him.

A few months ago, my Apprentice also switched teams and I said to him he was nowhere near ready to be assigned proper work. The work his team had planned would feature more advanced, Senior level topics like threads, and required good knowledge of the domain.

I advised him to partake in meetings and do a bit of pair-programming so he has a feel for what is going on, but he must spend half the day practicing code, working through the assignments I had given him.

After a few weeks he calls me and says he has felt he has wasted his time and learned nothing. I asked him what code he has written and he says he has only gone to meetings and been watching a colleague work. He then asks me for advice. I remind him of my original plan and he says “oh yeah, you did say that, I should always listen to your advice because you are always right”.

A few weeks go by and I ask him why I still haven’t seen any code from him. He said he felt bad doing his own personal tasks, on work time. In his team stand-ups meetings, he felt like he needed to talk about his team’s work otherwise his colleagues would think he isn’t contributing. I ask him what he has spoken about if he hasn’t done any work for the team. He has not contributed anything. At least if he actually practiced coding over the last couple of months, he would have had the skills to try and contribute from now on. 

He said I was right again, although he was still adamant he wanted to do some proper work. He promised to start his project at the weekend and continue to do it outside work. So I picked out a few bugs from the backlog that looked easy. His Product Owner and Scrum Master weren’t happy about bringing in work to their team’s backlog when it wasn’t planned. I explained that currently their work is far too hard for him and he isn’t contributing so should imagine him not in the team. So let’s give him some easy work, then he can do something. Even if the work is shelved and the Testers don’t have time to test it, at least he has learnt something and he will feel like he has done something.

So after 1 year of my mentorship, I can now judge him and he has been a complete disappointment. He has only done 2 easy bug fixes with my supervision. In some ways, I feel like a failure but I know I’m not a bad mentor. I have put so much effort in and gave him so much advice. I feel like he disregards it, then says I am right, but then doesn’t change and carries on with the wrong approach. I definitely held my side of the bargain of being the mentor that they promised him.

Has he started his project yet? No. He just comes out with excuses. He does have some good reasons, but it’s hard to justify not being able to find a few hours here and there over a year, or even just the last couple of months:

  • Moving into a new flat
  • Went to visit a friend down in London
  • Forgot his son was staying the weekend
  • His son enjoyed his stay so wanted to stay again
  • Decided to start boxing as a new hobby
  • Watching the Euro 2020 England game.

I’ve stopped asking him about it, because I feel like I am just repeating myself, and have given him so many ideas of what to code. He isn’t in my team so I feel like I’m not responsible for him anymore. I’ll still be around if he wants help or advice because I enjoy helping people, but I’m not going to be proactive anymore.

Truncate

A developer sent a review for a method that was displaying a tooltip. He was fixing a simple “null reference” exception, but the logic for displaying the tooltip seemed weird: 

If the text is greater than 100 characters, we don’t show a tooltip. If it is less than 100 then we do.

So I suggest that we always show the tooltip, but if it is greater than 100 characters, then we truncate to 97 characters plus some ellipses “…” to show the user that some text is missing.

At first, the developer responds that he was already truncating it. So I explain again that it doesn’t show at all in the case the text is greater than 100. He agrees to fix it. Later, he asked me to review the code again.

Now he is showing the tooltip if it is greater than 100 characters, but he is showing 100 plus the 3 ellipses to make 103 characters in total; which is over his defined limit. It’s a bit weird but not a huge problem. Additionally, he now no longer shows a tooltip when it is less than 100 characters, so he has just reversed the problem!

So I point out both the problems and he agrees to fix them. He asks me to review the code once more. Despite fixing these issues, he has now reintroduced the original problem that he was fixing! Now it will crash again with a “null reference exception”!

So I say 

“Doesn’t this reintroduce the bug you were originally fixing?”.

It’s a rhetorical question of course, I know full-well that it does; but it’s more polite than an expletive-ridden comment questioning his intelligence.

“No, it doesn’t bring back the original bug back in – I have verified that.”

I ask him if “he is sure about that?”. I don’t even need to test it, I can see that it is 100% a problem just by reading the code. I’d expect a Junior to easily spot that without testing it. Not sure how he could miss it if he had done some proper testing.

“As per my basic testing it didn’t crash but I can do some more testing and let you know.”

1 hour goes by. He then replied:

“Just now I saw the mistake from my end”

(－‸ლ) 🤦

Promotion Special

One reason I thought writing a blog would be good is that it would document my software engineering story to become a Senior Developer. That was always my ambition when starting out as a Junior Developer – to become good enough to be recognised with a fancy title.

An industry standard for Senior is probably 5 years experience, but that’s just a rough guide. I mean, 5 years of consistently being bad shouldn’t get you promoted. I’ve written about Performance Reviews in the past, and stated how the process never seems to work, or not for me anyway. So I think it’s been more like 6.5 for me.

Recently, I reflected on my promotion from Junior Developer to Developer in the blog Comparing to Others, and that was to build up to this one. Obviously you can tell from the blog title and the words that I have written so far – I have been promoted. Senior Developer. So let’s reminisce and discuss the movements over the last year or so

A few years ago, I was working on our upcoming software, but I was asked to return to the previous software I worked on, with a strong hint I would be promoted. In my performance review, my manager Chris then made some excuses why I couldn’t be promoted and hinted it should happen in January 2021. But in January 2021, Colin got promoted and I didn’t. He moved from Senior to Principal, so there should have been a free role available. My team members think I am a far superior developer to Colin, so how does it make sense that he is now 2 ranks above me?

My team members started being annoyed. I had people say to me they were frustrated I wasn’t being respected. Even Colin said he had been talking to the Head Of Development about how insane it is that I hadn’t been promoted.

everyone “technical” thinks you should be a Senior

Colleague Developer

and all the Spanish think I am a Señor

Me

I changed managers and my new manager said he would look into my claim that I was underpaid and would try to find out how to come up with a solid plan to also get me promoted. However, I had a performance review with him, and in the review, he read out the feedback my previous boss gave me, although Chris’ notes were vague. So he asked me to explain the “unprofessional comments”. I explained that I have a running-joke where I state “the project is in ruins” when theres a minor change to the scope. It’s an exaggeration and purely in jest, although someone in the team has raised a concern about it. I was really grateful for his response because he laughed and said the person that complained was wrong to do so. However the reason why I panicked when he first brought it up was – I remembered that I responded to Chris’ question on Slack a few days prior with the text “lololololol”. So I then realised that I hadn’t taken Chris’ comments on board whatsoever.

Months went by, and my new manager assured me he was trying his best to promote me but was just getting pushed back by managers. Eventually, after another team restructure, I changed managers again.

In my first one-to-one, my manager asked if there were any concerns I had with the company. I stated that I was underpaid and was getting overlooked on promotions so dropped hints that I would be looking to move on. A week later, he calls me and said he was “absolutely shocked” at how low paid I was so would be taking it to HR urgently because we can’t afford to lose great developers like me. He managed to get a £5k payrise although HR still insisted to underpay me for 2 months before they actually gave me it.

Another month went by and he confirmed I would be promoted. I stated in the past, HR don’t allow big payrises so would probably say I’d already had one and reject the request. He assured me he wouldn’t stand for that. He kept his word, although yet again, there’s a compromise. I get a further £7k but have to wait 6 months until they approve it. HR are just the worst. You would think they would know how to make staff happy. That’s their job, yet they treat people like numbers and not humans.

The good news is that I finally get a good salary and it matches the respect I get from colleagues. It’s not even a change in responsibilities either, so I got £12k extra for doing exactly the same job as before. I probably should have been on this wage/role at least a year beforehand though. Don’t get me wrong, I was grateful for my previous wage. I always remember the times I was unemployed and have known many friends to struggle on low paid/part-time jobs. It’s just frustrating knowing someone could easily join the company and be on a much higher wage than you, and sometimes you even hear underperforming colleagues boast about their higher wage.

The thing is, in the past, our performance reviews have changed several times and we have tried: filling in a form; interviews; filling in multiple spreadsheets and forms; manager’s opinion only – and you could say none of them have worked out for me. It was only when I essentially hinted at leaving did I get the promotion. It shouldn’t be this way. Great people can leave, and the most confrontational get their way. Surely, that is the worst system.

I think I can easily be happy with my job title and wage now. I shouldn’t be complacent because you never know what the future will bring. Maybe one day, I could even come up with an idea about how to fairly appraise people, because we obviously have no idea, and I’m pretty sure it’s a common problem in the industry.

Department Update – Interview With Colin

We had a department update where the Head of Development, Head of Programme Management and other senior managers were doing presentations on aspects that are happening in the department.

I was well shocked when the Head of Development said he had a special guest, and the next section is Interview With Colin. He was being interviewed about the performance updates and the important bug fixes his team was doing. 

The thing is, his team has one of the best developers, David, and David had done ~90% of the work. Colin’s work was minimal and the work he had done didn’t work at all, until other developers had helped him.

Yet there he was, taking the credit for the work by doing this important-looking interview. The annoying thing is, when the Head of Development asked if he wanted to give any “shout-outs” he named several people, but didn’t name David.

There was even one improvement that was hyped up, but that was the first time I had heard about it. So I asked David when that was implemented. He said it was done by a different team, but Colin was basically claiming credit for leading it.

I don’t know how Colin has wormed his way to such status, but he seems to be held in high-regard by management.