Some typical developer stories

We at Wirex , which offers a convenient mobile financial application for managing personal accounts, have decided to translate an article of an IT specialist in which the topic of relationships between developers and managers in companies is raised, and various aspects of professional relationships with colleagues are described.

Fred is a professional software developer and is associated with this industry long enough to fill a lot of cones in battles. He often recalls unpleasant, unfair and sometimes incredible moments that upset and anger him. Despite attempts to maintain a positive attitude, Fred is of the opinion that such experiences should be shared. If you work in the IT industry and feel that you are not treated properly, then surely you are not alone in this. He talks about the unpleasant moments in his career with the hope that more people will start paying attention to such incidents and may extend a helping hand to their colleague who needs support. So, Fred would like to share a few of the cases that took place in his own career. They are not in chronological order. He himself says that in some of them he is still hard to believe, but most of these moments now cause him to smile.

We pass the word to Fred. Next, directly translate.

One morning I came to work and noticed several server warnings that required attention. This was before AWS and DevOps appeared, so I had to log in to the server. For some reason, I was denied access, and therefore I had to log in to the control panel in order to reset the administrator password. When the senior developer team appeared and I asked about my access, he casually told me: “You know, I once didn’t like your work with the server, so I limited your access.”

The chief technical officer asked me to help with the development of new very important PHP and MySQL services, finding existing services created by three experienced senior developers and consultants using Ruby and MongoDB. He said that this needs to be done because "ActiveRecord is too slow." And now let me remind you that Ruby was originally created using MongoDB. At that time, the company had about 30–40 experienced Ruby developers, and only two junior / middle PHP developers who were specially hired to develop a PHP / MySQL service, which then turned out to be a complete disaster.

When I was the team leader, and my responsibilities also included job evaluation and salary assignment, one of my team members told me that he had been paid a salary. I was surprised and asked about this one of the founders of the company, which is not a techie. During the conversation, I also found that I had raised the salary of another developer from my team. And all this without consulting with me and even without my knowledge.

Excited by the approval of my speech for a speech at an overseas conference, I turned to our new head of department, who had worked for the company for only a couple of months and was engaged in organizing official travel. I expected praise and support, but, to my surprise, he told me that I could not go because "this is not the best time for this."

We had to do a rebuild server. Therefore, trying to be a “team player” and help my comrades, I began installing some basic packages. The senior developer in the team turned to me and, with the most serious kind of deep and cold voice, uttered: “touch nothing, this is MY server!”

One day, a new development manager pulled me out of one of our meetings and led me to another conference room, where our new chief technology officer was waiting for me. He met me with the words "well, it's time for us to take different roads." The reasons for this were such that I could safely talk about unjust dismissal. Trying to be a professional, I returned to my meeting, but the new development manager again quickly pulled me out of him, saying “we need you to leave right now.” Then he stood above my soul, watching how I format my laptop, then took me out of the office. This new development manager and chief technical officer quickly ravaged the company and left the country.

After the approval of the salary increase for all my direct subordinates, I was glad that our Chief Technical Officer was pleased with them all. Given the fact that my salary has not been raised for a year and a half, and asked for a modest increase in salaries. And to this I was answered "no, we will talk about it after the delivery of your project." My direct subordinates and I worked in the same group on the same project.

Sometime at the end of the working day, at about five o'clock in the evening, I, as the person responsible for recruiting new developers, wrote a message to our group chat, Slack, a good-natured message in which I called on our developers to view the test codes of candidates if they were already free. One person answered: “At the end of my working day, I do what I should have been doing all day long, and I spend it on other tasks that suddenly appear out of nowhere.”

Once I became very, very sick - I had difficulty walking or even standing, I felt dizzy and I had a fever. When I informed one of our founders about this, I was told to go to the office, even though there were no urgent tasks. There was nowhere to go, and I went to work. When I went out to eat with my colleagues, I felt so bad that I could not eat anything and could hardly sit upright. Then I returned home and was sick all week ...

My boss, who concurrently held the position of chief manager, wanted to dismiss my two developers. His tactic of sacking senior developers was to make the senior developer’s qualifications unnecessary for the firm and to offer his position to a junior developer.

I was tasked with exploring the Cassandra cluster configuration. After detecting certain network constraints, I contacted the then head of the network operations department. When asked about the impossibility of access to the Cassandra cluster, he confidently replied that "there is access." Later, I discovered that he had successfully tarnished ports and said that "everything works."

The head of the HR department, a woman and a big champion of personal diversity in the work environment, came to my interview to find out the reasons for leaving. The introduction was as follows: "I usually conduct such interviews only with women ...".

When I was not used to the realities of a large corporation, the following happened to me. After I asked several people and could not figure out how to provide my team with corporate iPads (but I knew that some other teams had such devices), I received the following e-mail: “Hi everyone ! Fred today tried to refer this issue to management through various channels. Awesome work from his side, but it seems that he is not very pleased with our answers. ” In response, a colleague unobtrusively reminded him that the lack of documentation on the process of providing devices with devices is not at all my fault.

After some discussions about our database on MySQL, a developer who recently joined my team suddenly raised his voice and, in an extremely arrogant and dismissive manner, said: “You just don’t understand this function, do you?”

At a meeting, a senior software architect, whom I had previously respected, was nearby. In the past, we worked in the same company for some time, so I smiled, said hello and wanted to have a conversation with him, but he quickly interrupted me with the words “I’m going to drink something” and left without even looking at me.

The general manager, who absolutely cannot be attributed to “techies”, instructed me to explore options for how to improve our outdated, customized e-commerce solution. After I provided the results of my research, I was told that “your conclusions are biased”. Later it became clear to me that he wanted to confirm the correctness of his policy from a technical point of view. Moreover, he has already decided on what steps we need to take.

One well-known manager came to our company as a new chief technical officer. He had no experience in dynamic development, and our company was changing at that time, and we used appropriate principles to the fullest. Two weeks after the appointment, the new technical director issued an internal document called “Controlled Chaos”. After reading the document, everyone immediately understood that he was describing a waterfall. Access to the document was opened in Google Docs with the possibility of commenting. Then people started asking hard questions. A few weeks later, many of us who were eloquent in the comments to that document were fired.

PS I do not blame people who are involved in the unpleasant cases that I have described. I believe that all these collisions were useful and taught me a lot, and I know that it would be possible to say or do something differently so that others would not think that I was too harsh with them. I do not share these moments to complain. I want people to understand that a more benevolent approach is better accepted by others and receives a more positive response.

The translation has been prepared specifically for Wirex's corporate blog, which offers a convenient mobile financial application for managing personal accounts.