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Spent about 5 hours today writing unit tests before needing to immediately drop them to work on something else that I didn't realize was urgent because the single email talking about it was sent to a different inbox.

Then, 2 hours after not being able to figure it out, I also had to drop that to try and solve an even more urgent issue.

Everyone keeps asking me if something will work and it's outside of my scope of knowledge. I keep saying I don't know but they keep asking. I can not go 5 minutes without someone messaging me asking if X will work or if Y is done or how Z is set up.

I DON'T KNOW. Christ in heaven take a hint, I'm in over my head here. I've been nauseously overwhelmed for hours and I feel the anxiety creeping in. This shit isn't cool.

Work isn't normally like this but it's been inching closer. I worked hard and raised some eyebrows and now everything is dumped on my head. People ask me DAILY question I have no idea how to answer. They ask me about systems I've never interacted with. They ask me about configuration I've never seen. They ask me about capabilities so far removed from reality it's asinine to even estimate on.

I'm also the only developer in my role. There's other devs but I do all the work for my part of the project, including massive broad features.

Is this normal? I'm a mid level developer for what it's worth, and that's a relatively new development. I was a junior not a too long ago. If this is what's to be expected him gonna need some fuckin meds like NOW

Comments
  • 3
    Been there. It isn’t fun.

    I stopped putting in that much effort, and people stopped “rewarding” (read: punishing) me with insane amounts of work.

    You always get what you tolerate. So, tolerate less.
  • 1
    @Root How do I go about that though? I have no problem telling people I don't know something, and I have no problem not knowing and trying to figure out... But I can't just tell my boss I'm not going to mess with a critical issue lol
  • 5
    @CoffeeSnake You obviously do need to focus on the critics issues. However, If there are several critical issues at once, either it’s coincidence or management’s failure to listen and plan ahead. Your boss’s job is to make sure the business runs smoothly, and all issues are considered, planned for, and addressed appropriately. It sounds like his/her approach doesn’t work well.

    tl;dr
    You do need to focus on the fires. However, your boss’s job isn’t to play firefighter dispatch; it’s to prevent fires.
  • 5
    Your boss (or PM or whoever in charge of work intake) needs to prioritize better if you have several "critical" issues. Send a list of them to your boss and ask which one is more important, then work on that and only that until it's resolved. Better yet, ask them to put the issues in order from most to least critical and work your way through them one at a time. If you have no choice but to multi-task, they probably need to hire more people to take on some of the work.
  • 3
    Yeah it's quite normal. In companies where team culture is not good or bad management, a good performer suffers the most.
  • 1
    @EmberQuill @CoffeeSnake What emberquill said.

    If your boss is adversely bad at prioritization, or keeps forking more stuff your way it seems to work to come up with that prioritization list yourself and tell your boss your working on X before Y gets done.

    I like to work up my priorities by "who will scream the loudest" when they realize their stuff isn't working anymore. And if you have another team that helps you out regularly and one of their things is broken, they become a high priority. Good help is valuable, don't lose that over forgetting to fix an app.
  • 0
    @EmberQuill The issue is more that I've taken on (unofficially) a lead-esque role despite the scope of my knowledge being mostly limited to one part of my project

    But since I have a lot of seniority on my team through other members moving to different roles and companies, people turn to me for answers pretty often

    The problem there being that there's a good bit I've never been exposed to and don't have familiarity with because of the type of work I do.

    So when shit does hit the fan and people ask me all kinds of questions to figure out a solution, I often don't have answers because I -also- don't know wtf is wrong. I can hypothesize a little but what I can derive ideas from is ultimately limited.

    Would ${parent project}'s configuration and routing to our own and their interaction with ${external project} cause ${specific failure}? I have no idea, half of that sentence is still foreign to me
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