Worked alongside lead dev who was also a contractor. The lead dev made a lot of demands on the codebase, and I managed to work around their demands, but at the expense of more progress. They were fired out of nowhere just recently, and oh wait, they never wrote a single line of code this whole time and the budget can't get us another contractor now. I am going to lose my mind on this contract and I'm pulling my first of many all-nighters right now, wish me luck.

I would say do not do an all nighter without overtime pay. And unless you want that overtime pay enough for YOU. You are not a slave to pick up management's fuck ups, and 2 weeks after you clean up this shit show no one will remember.

@craig939393 I'm on the tail end of this all-nighter and I think I'll never do this again. I'd agree it's a management fuck-up that they didn't follow up on the work the lead dev was doing. He sure fooled me until he showed me the gitignore file he was having trouble with for two weeks... A GITIGNORE FILE. Management has never managed a project before--it's their first time managing. And they got us help from another department that has no deadlines whose proposal is to just start completely over. And my contract couldn't end sooner. Thank you, this has been therapeutic.

A lead dev ... contractor?

That’s kind of like hiring a temp/contractor manager, architect, or DBA — they don’t have a vested interest in doing their job well, or even a reason to try since they know they won’t be around very long.

@Root That's the notion I get now. I had never done contract work before until this one. I just don't understand, though, how someone can just sit there and lie about what they're doing. I got along great with him, but I didn't push him enough to ask about his code. I just foolishly took his word for it.

In hindsight, his narrow demands held me up a lot from getting us on schedule. He blamed a dependency on my part of the code being finished first, so I even went as far as to rewrite it so it wouldn't have any dependencies, and he was still using that as an excuse. I had to play the "I'm confused, but in standup you said no issues" shit. Lesson learned, I guess... I just didn't feel like it was right to push the lead/senior. I should have.

@CatFoodParty it is your responsibility to let your superiors know of something is fishy.

Up to them to sort it. Why give yourself more stress? The business won't care that much about you, why care about them enough to make trouble for yourself? Been there done that.

@craig939393 I did, but management didn't do anything but fire him. We never got that code he supposedly worked on. I asked management daily, even asked him directly, to commit the code.

You're right, though, on so many fronts with my rant... Hard lesson learned.

They just got another senior-level dev working on another site. He said that if he's involved in this project, he'd start the entire thing over with older tech. I just can't get through to my boss that we have 10+ people wanting to write this project 10 different ways: we have to choose what we're going to actually agree to before starting over again, management doesn't get that. My contract's deadline is two months away. It's not going to get finished. Because of that, I'm really struggling with motivation. I just want to finish as much as I can strong so I can go on to the next thing in February. I hate the looming feeling that this could become my first, and hopefully only, 'total loss' job.

@CatFoodParty I understand you very well.

I just finished 2 and a half years on a project that is fucked. I started as a junior who didn't know shit but thought I did (and now I worry I'm still like that). At the time though I still wanted to be mentored, at least I had that much sense. Only after 6 months I realised my team lead and the other devs with 8+ years experience also know jack shit.

So I stopped asking them questions and started reading tech books and looking at respected company job adverts. I started studying like mad and after a year I became the best Dev on my team. Throughout this I tried to warn my bosses, and other devs started to come to me instead with their problems.

Finally my bosses listened and made me the tech lead (I never asked for that, but fine.. even if it's shit to steal his job I couldn't stand it anymore), and without a pay rise. But fine.

I then spent over a year and a half trying to make things better, and blocked every single fucking time.

Cont.

I couldn't even get the team unit testing. Forget SOLID, DDD, integration testing, definition of done, clean code, architecture styles, scalability, the list goes on.

It really makes me mad because I don't care about money, because I have it off, and because any job will give me more than I need to live on.

So why the fuck did I waste 2.5 years of my life on this shit product?

Anyway this product is doomed. The entire Dev team apart from 1 person is leaving now, my new job is next month. But still I hate that a product I worked so hard on to do a good job is just a steaming turd.

Best to just give up when your bosses are not good enough. It's a waste of your professional life.

@craig939393 Damn, that's awful... The lead dev at my last job was in your exact position. He was bullied by a team of senior devs and outperformed them for years until he became the senior. His pay never changed. He was my mentor until he left six months later for a much better role where he's happier. And the next day, I had all of his responsibilities for junior pay for the next two years before I left.

I don't know if it sounds pretentious of me to say this, but it's like I realized that I care too much about this particular project and the team involved. I want to fulfill what I promised and wash my hands of it, and I hate having to pick and choose what I can realistically finish in what little time I have. I've never had this kind of thing happen before and I'm afraid of how bad it's going to make me look moving forward in my career. I've thought about taking a few months off to just improve. But that's probably silly to do in a time like this.

Good luck at your new job!!!

@CatFoodParty This. The only way I can do a good job and produce architectural solutions is to lie about what I'm doing.

Anyway wouldn't worry about it following you. I'm the UK companies don't care beyond your interview. My references have never been checked, nor have my qualifications.