Yep. This is the way. Also, you’d be surprised how many devs don’t run through their own QA steps before asking other people to verify.
Yep. This is the way. Also, you’d be surprised how many devs don’t run through their own QA steps before asking other people to verify.
Yuck.
At some point, they’re gonna have to debug it.
If you’re trying to pull your weight, and it sounds like you are, the problem is either with the tasks, the codebase, or the teammates:
Potential problems with the tasks:
A ticket needs: clear repro documents (if necessary), screenshots, and clear steps to reproduce. It needs more than “Title: Add X to Y. Description: We need Y in X. Implement it.” unless you’re intimately familiar with the codebase. And even if you are, you still need a paper trail to back up what you’re doing. If you’re not closing tickets, be very chatty in the comments. Share where you are, problems you’re running into, and who you’re waiting on for help. If there’s a consistent theme to the things you’re fighting, keep a list of them and bring them to your manager. Be your own advocate and be very transparent about all the research you’re doing because other people didn’t.
Potential problems with the codebase:
Hey, it works. But it’s not documented, someone decided to be clever instead of elegant, the local story sucks, or it’s optimized to such a degree that you have to refactor just to add a simple option ("lol why would we ever need that data here? It’s inefficient!)
Potential problems with teammates:
Everyone pulls their weight. Everyone communicates in clear, declarative sentences and provides examples if necessary. “I don’t know” is an acceptable answer. Evasiveness, vagueness, specialized jargon, or acronyms point to the dev being insecure about their knowledge in that area. Be very suspicious of the word “should”: “that should work”, “that shouldn’t be hard”, “you should be able to…”
And, as an aside, I’ve seen this happen a lot. A new dev or contractor comes on, blows through tickets, gets good marks, and an existing dev or two get called out for not contributing with the same frequency. One of two things are happening here: the new devs are getting softballs, or they’re creating a lot of subtle tech debt that someone else will have to fix because they don’t have a full picture of the codebase. Eventually, those devs will be where everyone else is, but it’s still frustrating.
Hang in there.
It’s funny how soon they realize they want a good one.
I use a car analogy for these situations: You need a mechanic (IT professional.) I’m an engineer (coder.) They’re both technically demanding jobs, but they use very different skillsets: IT pros, like mechanics, have to think laterally across a wide array of technology to pinpoint and solve vague problems, and they are very good at it because they do it often.
Software engineers are more like the guy that designed one part of the transmission on one very specific make of car. Can they solve the same problems as IT pros? Sure! But it’ll take them longer and the solution might be a little weird.
Sometimes, very rarely, I tell my squad that today’s our unlucky day and we’re actually going to have to do math to the problem.
Oh hey, it’s a list of everything I’ve been ranting about for the past three years.
Sex is great but have you ever tried having a captive audience for every awful joke you can think of?
Two ways to find out!
Yeah, I swear it’s part of the culture at some places. At my first full-time job, my boss dropped the production database the week before I started. They lost at least a day of records because of it and he spent most of the first day telling me why writing sql in prod was bad.
Yep. If you’re in a situation where you have to write SQL on the fly in prod, you have already failed.
Yep! Good point.
I’ve been a dev for 20+ years and yeah, learning a new repo is hard. Here’s some stuff I’ve learned:
Before digging into the code:
Digging into the code:
There’s no silver bullet. Just keep acquiring information until you’re comfortable.
That would be pretty easy.
return "Why are you even trying to do it this way?\n$link_to_language_spec\nThis should be closed.;
Yep! And then read argv for command-line parameters + a parser. File IO + command-line controls gets you a shell of a utility to work with. Then grab a package you like the look, bring it into your project, and do something with it (image manipulation, network stuff, whatever…)
Steps to test: “Idk try some shit”