Hey all, I want to know how you all deal with management and pushing tech debt work. Here's a little bit of background on my current situation, and I'd love to hear how you'd deal with it....
Thanks for your points, there's some really valuable stuff here.
I'd say he's in his early 40s, and I try not to be ageist since I've had some outstanding older developers that I've worked with, but I think he's perhaps stuck in his ways a little bit.
Unfortunately, it's just me and him which are building this new API with no other developer involvement. So it's kind of like a "he said, he said" scenario. Another unfortunate to pile on top of that is that we don't work in Agile sprints (I've worked that for the past 4 years so it's quite a change for me), so I only speak to the other developers once every 1 - 2 weeks. The only daily contact I have is the "Senior" who is in charge of this specific Laravel project.
I love the idea about sitting with him and talking. At first, he seemed quite cold to me. It warmed up a bit last week but now it's back to cold, so I'm not sure if I just caught him on a good or bad day, or if I'd said something to upset him.
He was pretty firm about not doing either the OpenAPI or Composer things today, I tried to push a little bit, politely, and just say in the nicest way I could that Google Docs wasn't the best fit for what we needed and that we'd probably be doubling-up on our work in future. He seems very focused on the time the project will take, and it feels like he sees any suggestions as a burden.
He is technically higher than me on the job, as a supervisor, so it feels quite difficult to go to him and say: "Well, I think you're wrong.". I know it shouldn't be difficult, but that type of conflict just isn't something that's common to me.
I'm from the UK, so that might explain why I'm a bit hesitant to get confrontational. I'm still on my probation period so I don't want to annoy and lose my role.
I like that, I think it might do some good to level with him and just ask those questions outright. I might see if I can muster up the courage to do that tomorrow morning.
Company is about 1000 - 3000, with a dev team of about 9.
The probation period is my main worry. The project hinges a lot on me and him working well together, so I don't want to make that not work, or make it struggle.
There's usually a pretty solid hierarchy in UK companies, at least from a development side. You have the Junior - Mid-Level - Senior progression. It was the same at my last place (I was actually a Senior on the job role) where you have Juniors under the Mid-Level and Mid-Level under the Senior.
I always listened to other developers though, I saw the role less as a "I'm the boss" position and just that I have more responsibility for what I'm doing. If I didn't listen to some of the Juniors (who haven't had the time to gain some bad habits :) ), a lot of good things would have been missed.
I think intentionally picking the wrong solution makes you an irresponsible developer. Not only are you introducing technical debt immediately but slowing down your future progress.
But, you're probably right about leaving him alone and letting him own these problems. I've suggested OpenAPI, he picked Google Docs. I'll be there when we have to spend a few days rewriting the specs in OpenAPI.
I wasn't planning on bad mouthing anybody, that's a quick way to lose my job when I'm in a two-man team. The idea of going to his boss doesn't sit well with me, at least not about the technologies.
I'm going to speak to my boss and just make sure that we're on the same page about the role, and if they want to do the project the best way or the fastest way. Knowing businesses with an in-house dev team, they'll want it the fastest.
I wouldn't necessarily say OpenAPI and Composer are new technologies, they're tried and tested and commonplace across most PHP projects. I totally get his point. He's an older dev who's sat comfortably for too long with an ageing stack, and now is completely behind the new guys who are coming in from other companies and wanting to change things.
I think the place we disagree is that I believe technology is a place where progression is a hard requirement of the job. Computers get better, customers get more demanding, old solutions improved. You need to improve, every day.
My issue is more when the response to a new piece of minor technology that will make our lives easily is: "I don't want to learn YAML".
Update: spoke to the Head Dev this morning and made sure I knew what my position was, so it's definitely prioritising the project's speed first.
Then spoke with the Senior in question and apologised for any friction, and suggested we do a debrief after the first phase of development and go back and smooth things over.
What about the phrase "sunlight is the best disinfectant"?. You can allow people to air their opinions (regardless of whether you believe they're bigoted or not) and it'll hurt their cause. Alex Jones is nothing but a meme now because of having a platform.
Doesn't banning these people prove their ideas and conspiracies right and force them deeper underground?
If they aren't promoting literal violence, leave them be. Just because they upset some people isn't a reason to ban them.
The Westboro Baptist Church is a prime example of airing their foul opinions causing almost a complete exodus and switch on behalf of the church members. If you think you're right, try to convince them.
The fact that the website hasn't been updated since 2020 and still has an open CVE shines the light on Flatpak's attention to security.
Regarding point 3, if that's true, then why are all of the most-dowloaded packages on Flathub mislabelled as 'sandboxed' when they have full write access to a user's home directory? That isn't a sandbox.
Flatpak currently has a 7.2 vulnerability that has gone unaddressed since 2017. The maximum vulnerability rating is a 9, so this is quite major.
One of the first wow-moments when I first installed linux (2003ish) was Enlightenment. I though it was very pretty, and quite different from the mainstream WMs. It was presented as a feature, not a bug, that development was slow: the people behind it wanted to take the time it took to get it right....
The virtual desktops functionality is miles above any other DE, specifically. The settings are really simple, and the options in the right click context menus are really well featured.
Linux holds more than 8% market share in India, and it's on the upward trend (sh.itjust.works)
Martin Scorsese urges filmmakers to fight comic book movie culture: ‘We’ve got to save cinema’ (www.latimes.com)
Martin Scorsese is urging filmmakers to save cinema, by doubling down on his call to fight comic book movie culture....
deleted_by_author
Yousa gonna go down to the rule core jarjar (lemmy.ml)
How do you deal with management and tech debt?
Hey all, I want to know how you all deal with management and pushing tech debt work. Here's a little bit of background on my current situation, and I'd love to hear how you'd deal with it....
Bigoted community on your instance
lemmy.world/c/christians...
USB-C hubs and my slow descent into madness - Dennis Schubert (overengineer.dev)
I was looking for a new USB-c hub and came across this article. It’s an interesting write-up of what is on the inside of some popular options
Are packages from flathub always safe?
I usually trust my distro repos without checking. Can the same be applied to flathub without much worry?
Does anyone actually use Enlightenment?
One of the first wow-moments when I first installed linux (2003ish) was Enlightenment. I though it was very pretty, and quite different from the mainstream WMs. It was presented as a feature, not a bug, that development was slow: the people behind it wanted to take the time it took to get it right....
King Terry (lemmy.world)