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Got a CTO at my Unity job that's younger than me, which by itself is fine, but the only reason this guy was put into that position was because the previous CTO left the company at the time where I was relatively new and he is the person most familiar with the codebase of our primary project than I was at the time.

I understood the decision at the time, but still, having a position of power being handed to them just as a matter of inheritance doesn't command my respect. Nevertheless, I withheld my judgement at the time to see how his leadership goes.

Not even 1 year in and this young CTO started making jabs at me, calling my code hard to read and incomprehensible, to my face, in front of everybody else.

Motherfucker, I don't find his code easy to read either but I went out of my way to frequently ask him, the previous CTO and other teammates to clarify what they wrote here and there. He on the other, made no attempt to ask me for clarification and instead waited until company meetings to air these grievances.

Our boss started to ask me to follow SOLID principles (even though he can't recite what that acronym means) due to complaint from the CTO guy, even though the CTO guy doesn't even follow SOLID himself! But I took the higher road and didn't flip it right back on him.

What I did propose in return though, is that the dev team start using pull requests and have a code review process if the CTO wants to sign off on everything that gets in the codebase. Sounds reasonable enough, right? Not for this guy! He immediately starts complaining that reviewing pull requests would be more work for him. Motherfucker, you refused to go to my table to ask for clarifications about my code yet still want to understand what goes on, then do code review.

It was at this point that I realized that this guy doesn't actually want me to write good, clear code. He wants me to write code HIS way so that he can understand. Yeah okay, I can accept that idea in isolation. Some open-source projects require contributors to follow certain coding convention to make the maintainers' job easier too. One project that immediately came to mind is "In-game Debug Console for Unity 3D" (disclosure: I am a contributor to this project)

But guess what?

THIS COMPANY DOESN'T HAVE A FREAKING CODING CONVENTION. NOT WRITTEN DOWN ANYWHERE. NOT EVEN A VOCAL ONE.

What this CTO guy wants from me is a complete blackbox.

To all fellow devs out there, I hope you don't work with a CTO like this, or become one.

Comments
  • 14
    Actually it doesn't seem like what he wants is you to write to his own standard. What it seems like is he wants you to leave. To get out. To go away. To quit. That's what it looks like. And it looks like that because I have seen this exact same behavior before from people who wanted to make people quit.

    What they call a hostile work environment. You should start documenting these behavior.
  • 6
    If he wanted you to do anything he'd tell you to do it and work with you on achieving that goal, for example by writing a convention document. The reason for his complaints is not a conscious and appropriate desire.
  • 2
    Ask the guy to teach you, give him more work, make his life hell
  • 2
    @mundo03 seems he already tried that sort of with the review process and he just makes it go away.

    Best way to just go over his head. Schedule a high priority meeting with the CEO to give a SOLID explanation of what is going on and needs to be done.
  • 0
    @hjk101 it is very optimistic to expect a CEO to understand what is going on, and to not support the CTO.

    Try that, but you might have ti involve HR fir harassment or something.

    Get support from other team.
    mebers, Plant some photo evudence
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