Soft Skills Engineering - Episode 351: Senior hoarding and layabout lead dev

Episode Date: April 10, 2023

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: I’m not a software engineer, so you can stop reading here if you like ;-). I listen to this show every week as the soft skills you discuss are just as applicable to my role as an electronics engineer. I have 5 years of experience and in my opinion, the right level of competency to step in to a senior role. I recently started a new job and I’ve been encouraged by my boss to be more proactive in taking on senior work so I can be considered for a senior engineer promotion. The problem is, the existing senior engineers in my team are uninterested in sharing their workload with me. I will try to assist them with their senior-level tasks but it never lasts long as they will carry on with the work themselves after a short while. I’ve also been assigned senior-level tasks by my boss and when I’ve asked for small levels of assistance from the senior engineers they’ve taken it as an invitation to do the rest of the work for me. My boss is indifferent to my struggle as he only cares about the output of our team as a whole and not who does what. I know that I’m performing well as I was recently given a good performance review, so I don’t understand why I’m being denied these chances to step up. I don’t want to quit as I just started this job and the pay is good. But I also don’t want to just sit idly as a mid-level engineer while everyone I know gets promoted. What can I do? I am a junior dev and recently accepted a C2H position at a large enterprise company as a junior developer. I work closely with 3 or 4 other devs. Over the past couple of months, I have increasingly taken the lead on the project that I am working on, while the Lead Dev (also a C2H from a different agency) has taken a back seat and essentially stopped doing any work. The last time Lead Dev committed any code was over two months ago. Worse yet, Lead Dev is tracking time and marking tasks as “complete” in our work tracking software without actually doing those tasks. Lead Dev also approves all pull requests without reviewing the code, so I have become the de facto code reviewer for the other junior dev’s pull requests. I seem to be the main dev taking initiative on the project and trying to move work forward. Our manager is quite oblivious to this situation. They see that work is getting done, so have no reason to put our team under the microscope. I like Lead Dev personally, but I feel like my alacrity is being taken advantage of while Lead Dev kicks back and relaxes, and I feel like I have become a “Senior Junior” developer as a result. I think the “right” thing to do is to make our manager aware of the situation, but I don’t know if that’s necessarily the *correct* thing to do. If so, how I should go about doing so; if not, what else should I do? Help?

it takes more than pointing to a pile of divs and calling it a design system to be a great software engineer this is episode 351 of the soft skills engineering podcast and i'm your host jameson dance i'm your host contained within seven divs dave smith that's semantic baby soft skills engineering is a weekly podcast where we answer all of your non-technical questions about the technical field of software development. And so we will not speak of divs from here on out. Except to say that my good friends call me Div Smith. Div Smith.

That's an awesome nickname. I'm the Div Smith. I work with divs. That got better. I didn't even think about that. Yeah. I hammer the divs. Forging divs.

I forge them into design systems. It's a forgery of a design system, though. Badooms. You should thank our wonderful patrons I thought you were going to say You should do puns professionally And I was going to say I already do

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anyway it makes jameson's heart warm every time he sees uh we've actually we've actually installed a little uh game a little app on jameson's uh desktop where every time a new patron signs up a little cat walks across his desktop. That'd be amazing, actually. Well, I just revealed. It is amazing. Excuse me. Jameson confuses tenses sometimes.

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really like how you said the your labor's fruits because it made me think about if we could accept sponsorship money or or like sponsorship in kind right you're a farmer you grow potatoes yeah you just mail us some potatoes and then we shout your farm out absolutely the answer is yes yes unequivocally yes just write in we'll give you our address actually one time someone said they wanted to send us something so we purchased a post office box just for that it was the most expensive wonderful little gift that we had to pay for yeah it was worth it totally was great i've still got them actually where are they oh yeah they're right behind me you can't see them on camera but i do have some beautiful little gifts that we got from someone and one day i'll

reveal what they are but as for now they are obscured instead of that i will read our first question okay this is from an anonymous listener who says i am not a software engineer so you can stop reading here if you like i do not like i will keep reading okay i listen to this show every week as the soft skills you discuss are just as applicable to my role as an electronics engineer i have five years of experience and in my opinion the right level of competency to step into a senior role. I recently started a new job and I've been encouraged by my boss to be more proactive in taking on senior work so I can be considered for a senior engineer promotion. The problem is the existing senior engineers in my team are uninterested in sharing their workload with me.

I will try to assist them in their senior level tasks, but it never lasts long as they will carry on with the work themselves after a short while. I've also been assigned senior level tasks by my boss and when I've asked for small levels of assistance from the other senior engineers, they've taken it as an invitation to do the rest of the work for me my boss is indifferent to my struggle as he only cares about the output of our team as a whole and not who does what i know that i'm performing well as i was recently given a good performance review so i don't understand why i'm being denied these chances to step up i don't want to quit as i just started this job and the pay is good but i also don't want to just sit idly by as a mid-level engineer

while everyone i know gets promoted what can i do oh man what a strong visual of i go to the senior engineers asking for a little bit of help and they just take over and finish the project oh man that's painful i do this with my kids it's really hard not to i'm so good at this i'm so good at why should wiping the food off your plate and putting it in the dish fold paper in half very accurately better even than you give me that paper so i'll just do it have you seen that simpsons episode from a long time ago where the quirky scientist is in like a daycare or something and there's these little kids toys and the scientist wants the toys and the the kids want that he takes the toys from the kids and the kids want him back and

he's like you don't appreciate it on as many levels as i do uh no i haven't but i will after this okay that's what these senior engineers seem like yeah this is this is interesting i'm thinking about it from your boss's perspective and it kind of makes sense because one of the one of the ways that their output is measured is by the output of their team and that all kind of smushes together like their boss doesn't care who's doing what right on their team on your boss's team i should say i could see how that could get smooshed together for sure well what do you do about it uh well i mean you could just start taking credit for all this seat work that these senior engineers are doing for you delegated it to them yeah i mean look at me i'm a i'm a multiplier yeah

when you assign me a task that's really hard by golly it gets done and it gets done as if a really senior engineer did it too yeah and uh boy aren't those really senior engineers kind of slacking off on their tasks yeah why aren't they getting their things done yeah if you could manage to to scale this up and do this with like four or five senior engineers boy you could get promoted in a hurry is it sustainable though i think you've described the beginnings of a like a downline because then you just need you need to build the pyramid below you of people that are oh yes you're delegating stuff and well then i think about the pyramid a little differently what if there are other people who want promotions and you take their work from them feed it to your pool of senior engineers who

are doing your work so now they get promoted but then you can show i don't know you can show something and maybe get another promotion yeah this this will work it's sustainable the math checks out no one is being taken advantage of taken advantage of you're all it passes the ethical test small business owners yes you're all that's right you're creating jobs entrepreneurs yes yeah i think i think that's good one time i was in a long car ride with a relative not for my immediate family but outside of that and we drove by some mlm headquarters and i started trashing on mlms and after about 25 minutes they said hey you know my partner worked as an accountant for like that company for like a decade right

you were like yeah i'd forgotten i forgot that you're i i forgot they were such a terrible person i uh sorry i don't think mlms people are terrible people i just want to be clear that was just a part of the joke yeah i mean the companies are bad okay let's get back to the question okay um let's get out of here um what can you do i think is this a question of how do i get help on tasks well maybe there's two questions here how do i get help without having the task get taken over good and how do i actually carve out senior level work for me to do i think the first question feels easier to answer to me then that's the only one william okay good so i think the way you do this is you state clearly the outcome you're looking for by going to this other person for

help so say you've been given a task to hook an led up to a breadboard i've done some arduino stuff and that's my understanding of electrical engineering it's all breadboards and leds breadboards all the way down uh and you you don't want the completed product delivered like you want help with this one step so you you you might need to put in a bit more work up front to define and clarify like here's what i'm trying to do here's where i'm stuck can you help me with this specific thing yeah and and maybe maybe even say what you don't want them to do yeah yeah harder even than than saying here's what i want help with is like if they start trying to do other stuff say uh thank you. I think I can handle that. And I want you to be able to focus on your own work and,

and yeah. Or you could just say, okay, cool. We're done. Like, yeah. Now I'm going to go back to working on the rest of it. You know, I think that when you're, when you're asking for help, it's really also important to state why you're working on this task. And if you clearly say to them, listen, I'm trying to expand my scope and trying to take on more challenging work that would push me and help me grow. So this task is part of that plan. And the subtext there that you're not saying out loud is, if you take this from me, I won't be able to grow.

Yeah, I think as we usually do, I'm assuming there's no ill intent here, that they're not trying to like hold you down and keep you from taking on this high level work. Yeah, because we forgot to mention that in order to give you the senior promotion, one of them has to get a demotion to junior. yeah i mean it could they could be worried about that uh and that would suck and make this harder

if they're like trying to sabotage the competition at senior level but i'm not going to worry about that because that sounds hard and stressful i don't want to do that i'm here to have fun and talk to my friend dave the other the other question you asked was or you identified was how do you get this kind of senior level work assigned to you yeah that's what i said but also that one sounds hard so maybe not it sounds like it's kind of happening i've been assigned senior level tasks by my boss so it sounds like yeah it's in progress they just keep getting swiped away from you as soon as you get started yeah someone else swoops in and folds that paper for you someone just like jameson yeah i wonder if i wonder if these people are just so excited by

problem solving like maybe they just really like like the work they're that's kind that can be an engineer archetype of like oh a puzzle yes i'm gonna solve the puzzle and it's satisfying and engrossing leave me alone i'm puzzle solving yeah yeah oh you you've brought me this puzzle thank you because you know what you're doing is you're offering them a fun diversion away from the thing they were really working on which is some some terrible like powerpoint presentation that they had to do yeah yeah that's that's where again being really explicit about what kind of help you're asking for you could even time box it you could say hey can i have half an hour of your time and then when the meeting is up say thanks i'm going to go back and keep going on this task

that you are not going to start working on now like if you can make some some boundaries between the time period that they are helping and not helping then maybe it'll be easier for them to switch back to the other thing they were working on you could do one of those men in black camera things at the end could you forget that we talked about this this puzzle is no longer interesting to you yeah oh crap i held down the button too long and you just forgot the last week of work sounds like a rough day for you tomorrow see ya I guess you won't remember this part either

I'm out of here looks like the task of identifying who will be demoted to make space for me has become easier this guy can't even remember the last seven days how can we trust him as a senior engineer the person who keeps forgetting weeks of work

uh i can't help but notice we slipped back into question one yeah i have a solution okay what if we go on to the next question who's in charge around here do we have a producer or something um no it's it's consensus oh boy but i i will i will offer one like consolation prize on on number two, which is your manager is doing this for you already, it seems. And that's good. So I think you've got what you need there. If it's not enough, if the volume or the frequency of these projects is not sufficient to help you to build up enough of a portfolio for your promotion, then I would have that conversation with your manager by saying that you need more. And even though your manager

is not intrinsically motivated to give you those tasks as opposed to other people, keeping it on their radar will help it's better than not saying anything at all yeah also be sure to thank your manager for the tasks you have been given that were more senior level tasks cool have we answered this question i think so good luck good luck will you read our next question dave i will okay uh this question i believe comes from an anonymous listener who says i am a junior dev and recently accepted a contract to hire position at a large enterprise company as a junior developer i work closely with three or four other devs over the past couple of months i have increasingly taken the lead on the project that i'm working on while the lead dev also a contract to hire from a

different agency has taken a back seat and essentially stopped doing any work the last time leave the lead dev committed any code was over two months ago worse yet lead dev is tracking time and marking tasks as complete in our work tracking software without actually doing those tasks lead dev also approves all pull requests without reviewing the code so i have become the de facto code reviewer for the other junior devs pull requests i seem to be the main dev taking initiative on the project and trying to move work forward our manager is quite oblivious to this situation they see that work is getting done so has no reason to put our team under the microscope i like lead dev personally but i feel like my alacrity is being taken advantage of while lead

dev kicks back and relaxes and i feel like i have become a senior junior developer as a result i think the right thing to do is to make our manager aware of the situation but i don't think that it's necessarily the correct thing to do just for clarity the word right was in air quotes if so how should i go about doing so if not what else should i do help oh my goodness alacrity is a good word that's exactly what i was about to say and uh i just need to google that i know that word from playing dota 2 it's the name of a spell that invoker can cast oh yeah as soon as i said it was like the alacrity resource packs on minecraft alacrity brisk and cheerful readiness she accepted the invitation with alacrity cheerful readiness in dota 2 it makes the target do more

damage and attack faster and they call that cheerful readiness yeah yeah cheerful readiness to destroy your enemies okay uh okay i had two thoughts here my first one is you should talk to your manager i think i think you're right the other thought i had is maybe the lead dev is doing stuff that you don't know of it's not that they're doing nothing they're just doing other stuff and maybe that's worth investigating a little bit maybe not though marking tasks is complete in our work tracking software without actually doing those tasks that just sounds bonkers to me yeah i can't it if if what that means is the work is not done and they say it's done i can't see how how does that work for a long period of time they would get away with it yeah so i wondered is it

maybe taking credit for other people's work like oh i'll mark this as i did it i didn't do the thing but just so happens my name shows up on the story or whatever i don't know both of those sound bad but i feel like marking stuff is done without actually doing them that's really bad in my opinion yeah it feels like you're gonna get fired for cause yeah and in this case the person's gonna get fired because you're gonna tell your manager that they're not doing the job they say they're doing so that might be a little painful yeah i think you should talk to your manager still and the reason why is because you're in a contract to hire role you're not full-time yet and presumably the decision on whether you'll be full-time or not depends on your performance in this role

if you're actually working as a senior developer if you're leading the team but your manager doesn't know because they think the other developer is actually doing all the lead dev stuff that can make it so you don't get hired uh maybe maybe they decide they only have room to hire one of these contract to hire roles and like well we'll hire the more senior person that's doing all the leadership stuff so so even just like clarifying hey i want to i want to make sure you know what i'm doing for the team from a selfish perspective i think is is useful for your prospects of being hired at this company if that's what you want frankly if you're doing the job of a lead developer on this team but as i gather from the question you're not being paid

for that role maybe if you talk to your manager you could make that official in the form of pay raise yeah i mean you mentioned it there is one potential outcome here is they decide not to pay this other contractor anymore how much should you let that decide whether you talk to your manager about it or not yeah think of it not as getting fired but rather a modest pay decrease of 100 contract to hire maybe contract to fire it's a c2f contract to fire yeah this is rough though this person needs to be let go or needs to fix their work i mean it is it is unethical and it is harmful to your team and to your company and to your customers to have someone lying about the work they're doing if that is i'm going to take this at face value and assume that's what's

happening they are committing almost fraud i don't know if earthly law would consider this fraudulent activity criminal fraud but it sure smells like fraud to me in the cold light of space yes clearly fraud yes in the cold yes like if you took your car to get serviced by a mechanic they charged you for it they gave you a sheet of paper that says they did it and then they didn't do it what would you call that because that's kind of what i'm that's kind of what i'm thinking you would call this too yeah at the very least i would call it naughty one step below fraud legally yes naughtiness naughtiness in the first degree so another thing another action you could think about is do i talk to this person about it right

i don't want to go behind their back get them in trouble with the manager i do not think you should do that you're a junior developer you're new to the industry you're new to the team it's not your job to fix this person and i don't feel like you have this like moral imperative to tell them first before you tell their manager that you see this yeah but if you are going to go straight to the manager you better be right about it yeah or another option is to be very explicit about what you know to be true right like i was gonna say that too yeah yeah like i i see this thing and and so maybe you suspect that they're actually doing nothing but what you see is like i don't know there's a story that sat for a long time that you were blocked by because they didn't

they didn't commit on it and it slowed you down or whatever here are links to 15 pull requests that they were supposed to review and did not here are here are seven tickets in our task tracking system that this person said they completed but did not just cold hard facts do not tell your manager what to conclude from these cold hard facts just tell your manager the facts you observe and say i thought you might want to know about this also i want you to know it's painful for me to share this and also you should know your manager will probably not protect your anonymity in reporting this unless your manager is very very skilled it's very hard for managers to do that because your developer's first question when your manager confronts them about it

will be what what are you talking about well i don't know i mean this person told me you know johnny over here told me that it's like oh crap i work closely with three or four other devs so one of the devs is the lead dev it means there's two or three other devs that aren't you yep on the team they're probably gonna know yeah you could also talk about it in terms of the impact on yourself so maybe you have to spend a lot more time reviewing pull requests because they aren't getting reviewed by this other developer so it's slowing you down on your other work or keeping you from doing as much as you would like on other stuff and if you if you can approach it like i have this problem can you help me solve this problem can you help me solve the problem for me

uh i'm not telling you like what to do about this other person i just need i need i need help getting my stuff done or i don't know it's not the right way to express it but focusing it on you will also make it appear less like you're you're coming to tattle on this other person it's true now given that this person is probably going to find out it was you does that change your mind at all jameson that on on whether you should go to them first before you go to the manager no i think i've said on this podcast in the past you should talk to the person individually before raising a problem with the manager i don't remember when i just when i said this just now that you should just go to the manager first i had this little little ding in the back of my head saying i think you

just contradicted yourself yeah but i don't care i'll do it again too i'll contradict myself some more at some future date no i don't think so i don't think it's worth the and what's gonna happen like uh do you think they don't know that they're doing this and you'll like bring them to a realization they might not know that they're not getting away with it they might think but again i don't know is that your job to let them know hey you're actually not getting away with it and and i will do something about it i think that just puts you in a weird situation because then you have to decide like i warned them have they have they improved enough yeah exactly that take it to my man now suddenly you're the manager right yeah that's your manager's job yeah exactly so don't

deny your manager the privilege of doing the job they were assigned to do the joy of managing an underperforming team member possibly underperforming not just underperforming possibly actively thieving team member yeah an unperforming team yes yeah what's the opposite more of a detractor than a contributor i guess you could say yeah this does sound sucky i'm sorry you know i want to comment on one more thing the question says i like this person personally i retract my advice what what happened no i'm just kidding okay no oh that changes everything make it harder oh it's someone i like it would make it harder for me it is a little harder but also i'm i'm just i'm trying to craft a narrative about what could make these two things true

it's someone i really like but also they're stealing company money and they're freeloading on the team and i'm using i'm using kind of extreme wording there when i say stealing it's not 100 clear to me that this is theft like it's one thing to be lazy and not do a good job it's another thing to defraud your company from by taking a paycheck and and falsifying your output you know and this is somewhere in between there maybe i don't know if it's all the way to one end or the other but let's assume it's at the extreme end and they are defrauding your company but i like them you know i guess you could like them in kind of the platonic ideal of i love all my fellow human beings but this isn't a very likable behavior in my opinion and i wonder if this is a

really charismatic person who can get away with a lot on the momentum of their charisma that can carry them out of sticky situations that would otherwise land them in trouble yeah maybe they're they're they're a delight to have in meetings because they crack good jokes or something yeah we can't let this person go our meetings will be so bland yeah anyway i'm with you on the advice go to your manager it's their job to know this stuff the fact that your manager doesn't already know this means it might not actually be very well received you know if i had a team member that directly reported to me and was literally not doing any of the tasks i assigned to them i would know about that really quick so i don't know maybe

they're okay maybe it's a cabal maybe they're actually working together to defraud the company maybe your manager is also not doing their job okay conspiracy theory over well i'd probably want to know that you might have to get a different job that's the case and then your manager seems unlikely your manager is going to reach out to this person and be like the jig is up we've been found out that seems unlikely to me have we answered this question i think so good luck best of luck to you i hope this gets better me too what should people do if they want their own questions answered dave go to the worldwide web enter an address of soft skills.audio and And then click with your pointing device, which might be any one of multiple input modalities, including but not limited to a mouse, touchpad, finger, or a hot dog pressed against a capacitive-resistant touch screen.

I was not expecting that. Mouse, finger, hot dog. and specifically on the ask a question button which when you do we'll load a form that you can fill out and we have to say thank you so much to everyone who does that each week we love reading your questions we will answer all of them one day we promise thank you thank you so much we will catch you next week