Discussion between me and my N+1
(Note : I'm in the company for 3 months)

Me : As the tech leader, shouldn't you review my code ?
N+1 : I'm not the tech leader.
Me : Wait what ?
N+1 : I wrote the app from A to Z, hence I'm the architect.
Me : That's what I mean. Being the most knowledgable dev in the company makes you de facto tech leader.
N+1 : No, I'm not the tech leader. The CEO is.
Me : But he didn't even know the tech we are using !
N+1 : .... Anyway, I won't do code reviews. I don't like that.

(2 hours later)

N+1 : You made a mistake in the code. You broke a hidden functionality. You should be more careful, or ask me if you have doubts.

This guy is collector.

First rant here. Long, but please bear with me:

So after slogging my ass off in various early stage startups for over 4 years and keeping up with the almost non-existent development process, I joined an organisation which has some of the brightest and smartest minds I have had the pleasure to work with.

Mind you, this company is the market leader in it's field and has a 50+ people in it's tech team and the quality of work is pretty impressive.

Now for this week's sprint, I was asked to develop a feature which already exists on the Android app and they want to introduce in the iOS app too. The backend APIs are all in place and all I need to do is build it with virtually no dependency. My PM asks me to start with the UI and ask the backend dev for the API list whenever I need them.This is where the story turns.

For my first API, I go to the backend dev and ask him to share the API documentation and he looks at me as if I have asked him to dance the fucking cha cha. With a straight face he tells me that, 'The organisation doesn't maintain any kind of documentation for it's APIs.' Now this really shocks me. Even in a 5 men tech teams I have worked on, we have always maintained a spec doc for the APIs and this is a company which is known for it's tech practices.

Being the new guy I compose myself and ask if they have anything for me here: Postman collection, a workflowy doc, a goddamn txt file; anything which might help me, and he laughs at my dilusion and says no.

Dejected, I ask for a way to get the APIs and I am told that there are only two ways: either I keep bothering the Android dev for the APIs(No, I don't have the access to the android repo and nor am I gonna get it) which he had worked on 4 months back or I install the prod app on my phone, and use Charles to get every fucking API which is really, really annoying.

I thought writing out this rant would make me feel better, turns out it just made me angrier. Why the fuck can't they document such an important thing!?

My code is reviewed twice, once by the team leader, and once by a tech lead.
One told me to move a const from file a to file b, so I did. The other told me to move it from b to a.
I really don't care, so now they are behind me duking it out :)

This day I have received the most glorious news in e-pistolary form. For some years, I was suffering in support of a client who was, well, insufferable. My presence there paralleled the divine comedy in both essence and fact.

I opened the missive, expecting another plea to bail them out of whatever clusterfuck they found themselves in. Instead, what I found was something truly magical.

"Hey Human,

I hope this finds you well. I'm not sure if you remember a few years back, we were trying to decide between IBM Cloud and AWS. Well, after years of battling FF*, we're finally moving ahead with AWS. He failed one too many times to deliver anything visibly. After you left, there was no one left he could use to steal credit, ideas, and work.

FF is still pushing to have them use IBM cloud as a "warm backup" in the event "AWS fails." We will see where that goes.

I figured you'd like to know; you were the void in the wilderness for a long time. I don't want to think about how much time we could have saved if we had just listened.

PeeEm**"

This event represents a personal victory, albeit belated, over a few peoples' absurd amount of privilege. Towards the end, I was vicious about my contestation to the insanity of adopting a desperate hedge attempt-as-cloud offering from a failing company. Some examples:

// cloud 'strategy meeting'
Moi: What cloud platform are we looking at using?
FF: We're looking at IBM cloud and AWS as a second.
Moi: Why is that? I understand you're obligated to rep your offering first, but that decision doesn't seem to have the customer's best interest at heart.
FF: IBM cloud is a market leader; AWS isn't as good.
Moi: I see. I mean, that's the tech equivalent of the company's fleet management considering monkeys on tricycles as a strong competitor to service trucks, but I get what you mean.

// steering meeting
Director: Who can we look to as an example? Who is currently using the IBM cloud?
Moi: No one; they account for a single-digit portion of the actual cloud market. Their long game to sell you a "Hybrid Cloud," which means put some front end payload in a CDN, and buy n-frame units of IBM z servers for the DC with IBM gateway appliances acting as connective tissue. So it's not the cloud at all, really.
Director: How does it compare in cost?
Moi: It's generally 40% more expensive than other clouds, and it only goes higher as you option their software.
Director: What about Watson? I hear Watson is good?
Moi: It's a brand name. Most of the "Watson" product is just a facade on top of FOSS products like Spark, Hadoop, Elasticsearch, etc.
Director: Those were words. They sounded good. FF say it's good tho so we'll believe him because we're from the same city.
Moi: *deletes Director from LinkedIn*

Moral of the story: Never trust a vendor that only recommends their products.

*FF = FatFuck - an embarrassingly rotund individual whose girth is roughly equivalent to his height. He shit his way into an IBM architect position in his mid-20s purely due to winning the visa lottery. He had fake hair glued to his head for his wedding to hide his male pattern baldness; his arrange-married wife undoubtedly cries herself to sleep after sex.

**PeeEm - the then project manager, now portfolio manager of some satellite projects. An overall decent human being, capable.

How about to cut off the carbohydrates?
Let's start with this spaghetti code of yours

So we called out our project manager and tech leader, who sent out an email last Friday to our bosses and stakeholders a project schedule - which we never knew about until we saw it in our inboxes - that showed we had already completed development and would go on to UAT testing by next week.

Except if you look at our agile board we have 3 weeks of dev tasks left and a couple more for testing and QA. Then our dev environment is shit because the deployment steps in TeamCity were not properly done by Dev Ops. And we still don't have a UAT environment created, much less tested out. And the project manager is about to go on a one-month vacation. Great!

So we replied back with all the aforementioned information (less the swearing and name-calling) and sent it out to the same recipients, including our bosses and stakeholders.

That was such a fun Friday afternoon.

I'm in my first internship, they gave me their only company owned product. They always made interns work on that, and it's something I really appreciate (I like when people give to others any possible chance of learning)... But apparently they made a mistake: for the first year they never reviewed interns' code. And now that software is huge and full of bugs.

After two weeks working on that I said to the tech leader and to the PM that we should spent a couple of months rewriting more than half of the code, and surprisingly they listened and agreed (the TL already knew that, and the PM is not a dev and he listened to the TL).

After two days of code rewriting ("refactor" is a too weak word) the boss calls me and orders to stop, telling me basically "I agree on this decision, but not now; let's first make it work and then we make it great!".
Okay I respect that, but what he didn't understand is that the two things are strictly related!

Result: last week we had a first official release (with some client's testers, so they were expecting a few bugs) and nothing was working, so me and the tl started a really hard rewriting work (that didn't finish) and managed to release a very bade made software that works by chance.

After easter we'll keep working on this, and I think at the end it will be great.

First working experience, in two months I learned a lot (not only about code/tech).

Another nice rant while I try to find a job.

I make an interview with the senior dev (they are small and don't have a hr).
Everything sails snooth and they tell me "We will tell u something at the end of august"

Well yesterday I wrote to them, asking for news and not only they give me a negative response... (after they also said they forgot about me) but.... THE WROTE MY GODDAMIT NAME WRONG!

Like my email has my name in it, I presented my self and I closed the same mail with my signature. Yet they write a completly wrong name.

Like wtf!!! you can't even look for my name? it feels like they don't even know who I was.

I can say I'm lucky not to work for them.

What i thought to be a cool company, turned out to be a shitshow.

Our "Team Lead" when assigning tasks keeps saying things like "it's only..." or "It's just..." or "You only need to change one line [there]..." And that's in regard to a terrible product with a pile of tech debt. So when you actually start to develop/fix things, you end up redoing third of the whole application.

How do you deal with this? How do you tell the "leader" that he should look into what we have in a code before making us all look bad for doing "just this one line change"?

Remembers a time when I was considered non-technical founder and not taken seriously as credible tech company leader by smart ass VCs

Years invested in learning, experimenting, building. Now somewhat capable.

Considered too technical to be understood by dumb ass VCs.

😤

I started my career almost 20 years ago now.
I had the chance to work in really good environments, and with people trying to be performant. In my first company, the CTO pushed a lot the new/shiny XP method. Then I used the first iterations of Scrum as a Team Leader.
As I became a Service Manager, I found my love in kanban/lean (and my worst nightmare in sigma six).

I crashed startups created with friends and cashed out sometimes.

I also did a lot of "agile consulting", around productivity, product methods, organization (even got certified SaFe, the Agile framework that states" process over people").

When I came back to Europe, I just wanted to get back to the level I was in North America.

I have done a lot of mentoring, but now I lack the motivation (and time) to keep doing it, the way I did. So I stopped.

And now I have to answer the question "do I leave delivery?". Also, it seems that a lot of actual organizations are starting to put the product under " tech top management" ( companies I like at least).
So I wonder, what my next evolution should be...

Should I leave tech delivery to be fully Top-Management...
Do I want to structure/handle/organize the Product Teams...

Covid has given me time to start thinking a lot more about my situation... And it sucks...

I always procrastinate a lot, but often it's more like taking a creative break so in fact it can make me more productive once I get back to my desk and start "doing actual work" typing code into my keyboard again.

Procrastination becomes unproductive when I have reasons not to do the work, like it's an rude customer, uncooperative team leader, a useless requirement or involves inappropriate or terrible tech stack and legacy code.

Sometimes all of that comes together, but I found even in that situation when procrastinating on devRant and swearing every other minute, I seemed to be above average compared to my team mates who probably felt the same.

Most of us quit the company at some point of that ongoing project.

Can someone explain to me the need of a "technical management"? I know my question is naive, but try to explain it like to kindergarten kid.

Case 1. When team is good, and has a good tech leader(s) then the software director/manager makes more harm with his silly ideas, pompous cliche "calls to arms" etc.

Case 2. On the other hand, when software team is shit, it means that the management is responsible for assembling such team. Then it further means that they can't distinguish impostors from really good talents, which leads to bad quality, missed deliveries, bugs, frustrations, etc.

I saw many times when good technical lead (aka architect, staff, principal) made a positive difference. But I NEVER EVER saw that things were bad and "manager/director" made a positive change. This concept is soooo flawed....

... any one explain please?

Would you consider a technical leader to be as some kind of teacher ? I mean should he/she be teaching stuff teammates should already know ?