9
Shardj
323d

I'm considering quitting a job I started a few weeks ago. I'll probably try to find other work first I suppose.

I'm UK based and this is the 6th programming/DevOps role I've had and I've never seen a team that is so utterly opposed to change. This is the largest company I've worked for in a full time capacity so someone please tell me if I'm going to see the same things at other companies of similar sizes (1000 employees). Or even tell me if I'm just being too opinionated and that I simply have different priorities than others I'm working with. The only upside so far is that at least 90% of the people I've been speaking to are very friendly and aren't outwardly toxic.

My first week, I explained during the daily stand up how I had been updating the readmes of a couple of code bases as I set them up locally, updated docker files to fix a few issues, made missing env files, and I didn't mention that I had also started a soon to be very long list of major problems in the code bases. 30 minutes later I get a call from the team lead saying he'd had complaints from another dev about the changes I'd spoke about making to their work. I was told to stash my changes for a few weeks at least and not to bother committing them.

Since then I've found out that even if I had wanted to, I wouldn't have been allowed to merge in my changes. Sprints are 2 weeks long, and are planned several sprints ahead. Trying to get any tickets planned in so far has been a brick wall, and it's clear management only cares about features.

Weirdly enough but not unsurprisingly I've heard loads of complaints about the slow turn around of the dev team to get out anything, be it bug fixes or features. It's weird because when I pointed out that there's currently no centralised logging or an error management platform like bugsnag, there was zero interest. I wrote a 4 page report on the benefits and how it would help the dev team to get away from fire fighting and these hidden issues they keep running into. But I was told that it would have to be planned for next year's work, as this year everything is already planned and there's no space in the budget for the roughly $20 a month a standard bugsnag plan would take.

The reason I even had time to write up such a report is because I get given work that takes 30 minutes and I'm seemingly expected to take several days to do it. I tried asking for more work at the start but I could tell the lead was busy and was frankly just annoyed that he was having to find me work within the narrow confines of what's planned for the sprint.

So I tried to keep busy with a load of code reviews and writing reports on road mapping out how we could improve various things. It's still not much to do though. And hey when I brought up actually implementing psr12 coding standards, there currently aren't any standards and the code bases even use a mix of spaces and tab indentation in the same file, I seemingly got a positive impression at the only senior developer meeting I've been to so far. However when I wrote up a confluence doc on setting up psr12 code sniffing in the various IDEs everyone uses, and mentioned it in a daily stand up, I once again got kickback and a talking to.

It's pretty clear that they'd like me to sit down, do my assigned work, and otherwise try to look busy. While continuing with their terrible practices.

After today I think I'll have to stop trying to do code reviews too as it's clear they don't actually want code to be reviewed. A junior dev who only started writing code last year had written probably the single worst pull request I've ever seen. However it's still a perfectly reasonable thing, they're junior and that's what code reviews are for. So I went through file by file and gently suggested a cleaner or safer way to achieve things, or in a couple of the worst cases I suggested that they bring up a refactor ticket to be made as the code base was trapping them in shocking practices. I'm talking html in strings being concatenated in a class. Database migrations that use hard coded IDs from production data. Database queries that again quote arbitrary production IDs. A mix of tabs and spaces in the same file. Indentation being way off. Etc, the list goes on.
Well of course I get massive kickback from that too, not just from the team lead who they complained to but the junior was incredibly rude and basically told me to shut up because this was how it was done in this code base. For the last 2 days it's been a bit of a back and forth of me at least trying to get the guy to fix the formatting issues, and my lead has messaged me multiple times asking if it can go through code review to QA yet. I don't know why they even bother with code reviews at this point.

Comments
  • 2
    You hurt their feelings trying to do things better
  • 0
    You're working in PHP..? Ew 😅
  • 1
    @atheist ha, I learnt it during school and just kept at it as that's where my experience was. I've mostly ended up doing DevOps stuff for the last 5-6 years but I kinda bridge the gap between that and programming a lot of the time as a weird hybrid. I've managed to stay away from anything like wordpress development thankfully. It's a solid language if you actually use the available tools, although I do dislike the sometimes inconsistent function naming and that PHP can allow you to write truly terrible code if you don't know what you're doing. Using a decent framework fixes that last issue for the most part though.
  • 1
    @TeachMeCode that's what it feels like, it's very demotivating. I've been putting an active effort into being diplomatic and trying to word things as a "how about this?" But it seems there's no getting away from it. The lead is never rude to me when telling me I'm in the wrong or whatever else either at least. That doesn't really change the meaning of their words though.

    I seriously don't get why the lead of all people seems so resistant to obvious improvements. Why does he want to have a 16 person meeting to discuss whether they should continue using html as strings in php or change to templating? They're even doing this while using Vue and laravel in other projects so he must understand the obvious benefits? The guy seems afraid of the Devs under him getting upset, he's been at the company for less than a year so I don't know if that's related. But he's pretty much very positive about ideas but then a nightmare with allowing implementation. Or folds as soon as a junior disagrees.
  • 1
    Shut ur ass. Im also working DevOps for a multi TRILLION dollar bank! The whole system is a total cluster fuck. I have to do half the shit manually. No idea how any of this shit is devops
  • 2
    @b2plane sir did you submit a ticket to have permission to write this comment? You aren't part of the DevRant social team so this would need to be elevated to management for cross team collaboration project. Do make sure when getting this project approved you schedule a meeting to discuss the aim and set actionable goals, and ensure you invite at least two full teams who are completely unrelated to this request and have absolutely no input to make.

    My previous job dealt with lots of large brands as clients and this shit was a nightmare. I was glad to have a project manager for that job who could deal with most of it for me.
  • 3
    Had this happen at a small company (~50) and then they fired me because I was "too much" or something

    I wasn't even against sitting back and just collecting the pay cheque cuz they paid pretty good, but the team lead I think didn't like that I made her look so bad during code reviews with higher ups then did passive aggressive things

    Could be worse

    I deal well with boredom. If remote just do your work and piss off, if you're stuck in an office I guess consume content to bid the time by. Probably gonna have to do some side projects not to get rusty but I wouldn't do anything important on company hardware for the potential of legal shenanigans (though the capability of a company to even achieve that is probably pretty low)
  • 1
    Leave. If they are unwilling to improve, you're gonna feel more miserable as time goes on.
  • 1
    @Shardj yeah, I think the main problem with PHP is the legacy, it used to be a bit of a wild west and so there's a lot of dodgy code and people that learnt from that dodgy code.
  • 1
    @jestdotty I'm remote 4 days a week at least. When I'm in the office it's a desk share set up along a few rows. I spent the Wednesday we just had writing up a long term plan on what I think the ideal infrastructure and operations would look like based on my conversations with the lead. Doubt it'll ever happen but it's something to do at least.

    I've had enough jobs where I do shit all for most of the day to be honest. And personally I find it's just not really very healthy, I end up spending all day on youtube or reddit and then I feel shit as a result. That's the point where I know I need to look for a new job.
  • 1
    I'm not a big believer in sprints in general to be honest, I find them stifling as when I find something interesting to work on or fix I want to grab that motivation and hyperfocus for 7 hours straight then and there. I don't know why but I find I lose a lot of that motivation for a project after a short while. I'm not diagnosed or anything but it's pretty ADHD of me I guess.

    Having absolutely nothing to sink my teeth into like this is basically the worst thing ever.

    And sure sprints can work, a lot of goals can be effectively planned out into one and that works quite nicely. But I do only see them as a good idea for something that has with well defined goals and the sprint should stay specific to that. Not my current situation where I work in a constant cycle of month ahead of time planned sprints for literally every piece of work and absolutely zero way to grab a problem found in the moment.

    I'll probably go back to looking at smaller companies for a new job.
  • 1
    I left a FANG company after being told "that bug isn't a problem for me so I'm not going to fix it". It was a blocker for me. Most unprofessional conversation I've ever had. That includes the guy in my uni team project that accused me of bullying then left the team...
  • 1
    @atheist that would really piss me off, my main deal breaker today that's making me consider leaving is how fucking rude the junior was about my feedback. And the lead supporting all of this. The guy has been making minor changes to formatting the whole day then putting it back into code review without touching anything else that I brought up (including more formatting issues). Formatting issues being the only thing I think I'll actually be able to get him to fix with my lead's current attitude. The guy just can't be bothered.

    I'm very much used to the mindset of: if you find a problem during your ticket that's tangentially related in any way, it's your responsibility to deal with it or the codebase will never improve.

    Oh class A is very legacy and is a bundle of static functions when it should really be a dependency injected singleton? And you're using class A? Fix the class even if it turns your 3 line change into a days work.
  • 1
    @Shardj if I gave that attitude when I was jr i would’ve been handed my final paycheck and got my ass shoved out the door
  • 1
    @jestdotty oh dude I have loads of hobbies, main ones being I'm big into mycology right now and last year I was very into brewing. Before that was houseplants. I'm an avid reader and was hitting over 100 books a year over the covid period and still manage about 50. I don't really play video games very much any more, they lost their charm 4 years ago or so, not sure why. And I've got a new born baby girl at home to spend time with.

    It's just despite all of that, if I'm working I feel like I need to be in front of my computer and at least ready to work? Not sure if that really makes sense, but I don't feel like even with nothing to do I can just bugger off and leave my laptop. I put up a painting today and that was pretty much it for leaving my desk to do something non work related.

    I quit reddit for about 6 months when they screwed over the 3rd party mobile apps. But I've found myself slipping back.
  • 1
    I would NOT put up with a jr spewing shit when given tips bc that’s what the jr role is-a learning role. If they reject learning I’ll reject paying them
  • 2
    @TeachMeCode you'd think it would be something to pull them up on at least right? The lead even initially said he'd talk to them about it when I brought it up with him and I thought I'd finally found some sanity in this company. But then when he came back he said he'd also spoken to the other senior dev working on that repo about the PR comments and they're in the right as that's how it's being done everywhere else in the code base. In what world is writing code that's consistently awful better than having slowly growing oases of well written code overtaking the bad.

    So the lead told me that I need a full team meeting with all 16 members of the dev team just so they can make the decision to no longer concatenate a bunch of html as strings in PHP or hard code production DB id's into the codebase. The whole thing is blowing my mind still, I don't know how I ended up here when it seemed so great in the interviews and I chose to take this offer in particular.
  • 1
    Run away. People like these don’t change.
    One of my jobs was plagued by 1k LoC functions, amongst other spaghetti variations. I suggested something simple to at least start improving this, and was told off. These people like writing garbage.
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