As you climb the layer cake, be a shit umbrella not a shit funnel.
Fuckin words of fuckin wisdom, Lahey
Yeah i wish mine was like that
Middle management is also there to communicate both ways in order to manage expectations. Especially when the senior dev is busy as well. And ideally the first few weeks to months after onboarding are there for junior devs to train and to get comfortable with the new environment (programmatically and socially). I get a lot of anti-work vibes from Lemmy communities, and while I get that capitalism is bad and big corps are optimizing profits over the employees’ well being, I also think that work doesn’t necessarily have to suck. I mean, it’s pretty neat when someone’s good at a thing and gets paid for doing something they somewhat like and are good at 70% of the time.
If times are rough and you have to take what you can get, that’s obviously shit, though…
Apart from perhaps parenting, work is supposed to be the best, most fulfilling thing in life. The root crime of capitalism is alienation, the source from which every other of its more serious crimes flow.
My internship manager was great at giving me challenges that were tough but achievable. I took their offer even though it was low for a fresh engineer because that team was so great to work with
If you’re missing deadlines and getting customer complaints because of a new hire, that’s a failure in management, imo.
(Of course, that’s not saying management will take responsibility)
That might be the point, though.
It’s nearly always a failure in management. In every company I’ve worked in, at some level failures come from bad leadership decisions.
Lack of communication, unrealistic deadlines, bad processes, no guardrails, no redundancy, poor/absent/too-harsh feedback, micromanaging, lack of observability, inaccessible resources, poor morale, etc. All management’s responsibility.
heh… every management failure you mentioned was a problem at my last job. impressive.
Devs never miss deadlines or fuck up. Never.
Most devs absolutely suck at estimating the time involved in a task. If management is setting deadlines by asking “how many hours will this task take” then missing a deadline is on management.
Is senior’s job to multiply junior’s estimate by 3 before telling management.
Devs missing deadline because they fucked around, or under estimated the work required and didn’t budget themselves enough time is more there fault (assuming the reason they under estimated wasn’t lack of information from management). Devs missing deadlines because someone tells them Tuesday that they need to drop everything and pick up a 5 pointer and have it done by Thursday, is management’s fault. The “unrealistic” part of the “unrealistic deadline” was the key word there.
Here is a real life example for you. Last year we had a few tasks for migrating our logs and dashboarding from Datadog to Dynatrace. We had just gotten our logs routing to Dynatrace on Wednesday, and were going to start work on migrating our dashboards (or actually rebuilding as there was no way to directly migrate them) the following sprint.
Then on Friday, I get an angry call from a manager of some other team that had some responsibility over the Datadogs licensing asking why we still have logs routing to Datadogs. She says that the license is being hard shut down on Monday and we need to be migrated already. So I had to drop everything. I had to export everything we had in Datadogs, and start manually rebuilding in Dynatrace (which uses a poorly documented proprietary query language I’d never used before), prioritizing the most important stuff for our support team before the weekend lest they fly blind starting Monday morning.
I only found out on Monday that this manager didnt know what they hell she was talking about, that we weren’t on the license being ended, and we had another month to do the migration. I was treated like a fucking champion by my own manager, who had been out of office on Friday, for getting done as much as I had in a single day, but there was no reason for it. She was misinformed from bad communication. And even if she had been correct, her lack of observation on the matter earlier and only informing us about the issue at the last minute was inexcusable. So was her anger over the situation at our team, who doesn’t fucking work for her, btw (not even sure which team she’s over), for not falling in line with a deadline we didn’t know about, or as it turned out a deadline we didn’t even have… bad management.
It’s more that the consequences of a management fucking-up have many times the impact of the consequences of the fuck-ups of individual members of the team, because a single manager’s choices impact the work of multiple people.
Further, managers who do things like setting the deadlines themselves, actively pushing the devs to lower their estimates of the time it takes to do something or, even better, actually take a junior developer’s estimations at face value, are the ones responsible for the deadlines and thus to blame when they’re missed - if in some way or another you forced certain deadlines on the team or fully trusted information from the least knowledgeable, it’s on you, not on others.
Some managers are actually pretty good in that they don’t do that kind of shit and even properly manage things like client/external dependencies, but in my experience they’re a minority.
Granted, when the deadlines are missed for such managers it’s not usually their fault: sometimes it’s the devs’ fault and others the fault of somebody upstream in the process (such as the client, an external provider or a business analyst).
That said, I can see where the stereotype about managers fucking up projects would come from, especially in certain countries where the management culture in Tech is one of bullshit, incompetence and even bullying, so they have way fewer competent managers and way more abuse than countries with better management culture in Tech.
That is, until Sr. Dev is forced to babysit AI producing PR slop all day while Jr. Dev is looking for a new job.
Wrong
We fire the Sr Dev and get the cheaper Jr Dev to oversee the AI
Right. Sad but true.
Maybe. Maybe Sr Dev uses their connections to help Jr Dev look for a better job (assuming they like Jr Dev, maybe they look together) and one day Jr Dev helps them back. You never know.
But according to LinkedIn we’re all too crazy about AI to care about Jr Dev if we can have fun with AI. We’re all having a ton of fun using AI, right?
yes. tons. of. fon. 👏.👏.
What would be your favorite most fun part about AI? Mine ist constant sorrow, face palming and existential crisis ever since management heard of it.
mine is the bucket of thumbs i gotta carry around if i wanna not look suspicious on camera
I’m doing tech support and customer support. The dev team missed their deadline on the launch of the new ERP and launched it anyway a few days later. There are still Lorem Ipsum in some places. We can’t even edit client’s names or phone numbers yet. We also can’t open new accounts for a handful of clients.
I usually can cover for “my” team. We all make mistakes and sometimes things are not going according to plan. But so far it’s the worst deployment I have ever seen. I gave up on trying to help clients and I’m now just telling them I can’t do anything, while the dev team is telling me they are working on those issues and they should be fixed “in the following days, bro”. It’s been two weeks of “this is gonna get fixed soon” while I am bullshitting the clients telling them “oh I’ve been told it would work now, please try again”.
I’m tired and they should be better. I just script for fun. I was doing PHP 20 years ago and still host a few services for a handful of people, and sometimes I think I might do a better job than some junior programmers.
Wait till you see how beat up the Dev Manager is who is protecting the Sr Dev
Well, that wasn’t my experience when I was a junior, every failure was blamed on me, PR is deliberatelty stretched to look like I am slower and worse than I am, it was a lot of suffering but we all have to start from somewhere.
Didn’t all the junior dev roles get taken by ‘agentic AI’ leaving an entire generation of devs to the mercy of AI mentoring. That’s going to end well.
Historically this protection was the role of a competent project manager (Yeah, they existed, rare, but gold), a senior dev wrote code, a pleasing experience that made the slog uphill (both ways) worthwhile, much like art.
If OP got it from a snr dev, kudos to them both.
Pretty much. We had the worst junior dev ever and he never got better for a period of two years because he was coddled and allowed to keep submitting horrible code. He was laid off, thankfully honestly, but if there weren’t budget cuts I feel like he never would’ve improved and just kept wasting everyone else’s time.
Edit: the point I was making here is that coddling him kept from either being fired or getting better. Not sure why people cannot understand that more than one thing can be true. In this case that the dude is a horrible dev and also that management dropped the ball. I tried to teach him shit. When he didn’t improve I let my manager know how things were going. Nothing happened to him for literal years.
And as the cherry on top here he said he was going to start some kind of businessy-sounding machine learning degree program, after he was let go in layoffs. So yeah the dude knows he sucks at coding but definitely wants in on the AI grift.
So why didn’t y’all train him if he was that bad?
Sometimes it just doesn’t pan out.
Had a junior dev that basically decided he would rather try to grift through instead of doing the job. Never seen someone work so hard at trying not to work at all. Every day it was a different excuse, a different other person to point to as to why he didn’t even try to do anything that day. I think at least 7 or 8 of his grandmothers died during his tenure. And management ate it up.
Until one day he lost track of things and blamed the manager asking him why things weren’t done. Said the manager never sent him some material and of course the manager had. Suddenly the manager believed the rest of us who had been saying he was lying for the last many months…
The key was he was cheap and was in theory supposed to be as good as a higher paid alternative, so management would have to admit to being wrong to ditch him…
This assumes that Jr Dev wanted to be trained, and could be trained. I’ve known some AI-brain “devs” from before AI was a thing.
If someone can’t be bothered to read an error message, can we really be expected to teach them how to debug? Etc.
Oh a “what the hell’s an error message” Dev. I thought they all died out
There’s a tsunami of them coming, and they will all beach in the Great AI Outage of 2028, just you wait.
Yeah. Several of us tried to train him. He was not only not as good as he seemed in the interview, he didn’t care to learn.
“Someone represented themselves as being very interested in development and getting better at it. It’s obviously not their fault if all that was bullshit!”
It is a long story but yeah it was about 80% management’s fault and 20% the fault of the dude having zero ambition. I didn’t expect this comment to get so many downvotes… it’s as though I would need to explain that I’m not entirely blaming him for continuing to be employed in a problematic manner as he was. Obviously management should have addressed the issue and didn’t, but why am I not allowed to blame a person for sucking at their job… ? If the idea is that if I thought he sucked I should have fixed it, that’s silly, but regardless I did try to teach him things. He never retained anything, so after a few months I gave up.
Corporation is parasitic. Why did you sustain the existence of Mani Mani’s vampiric thieves of your entire existence, by your own choice?
That guy wasn’t making mistakes when poisoning the blood drawn.
