On the topic of having to make decisions as a dev that shouldn’t be made (solely, at least) by devs…

There’s a lot to like in my current work environment: I enjoy being around my colleagues, I get to do a variety of tasks, and many of them interesting to me and/or great learning opportunities, the pay doesn’t suck and so on… there’s also not much pressure put on the dev team from other parts of the organisation. The flipside of the coin is that nobody who should express some kind of vision as to how we should develop the product further does so.

Me and my fellow devs in the team are so frustrated about it. It feels like we’re just floating around, doing absolutely nothing meaningful. It’s as if the business people just don’t care. And we are the ones ending up deciding what features to develop and what the specs are for those etc. and I really don’t think we should be the ones doing that.

One would think that’s a great opportunity to work on refactoring, infrastructure, security and process improvements and so on - but somehow we get bothered just enough by mundane issues we can’t get to work on those effectively. Also, many of the things we’d want to do would need sign-off from the management, but they are not responsive really. Just not there. Except for our TM, but they don’t have the power neccessary… at least they are trying tho…