Being made tech lead on a team looking after 5 unrelated apps that are all shit.

Anyone else find the role of tech lead just a complete pain in the ass or is it just me?

As soon as I got told this I wanted to quit on the spot

Asked to point a story, but the customer can’t put into words what it should do.
Unbelievable.

Jimmy Bogard purely because he gets loads of hate on social media because of idiots abusing the free libraries he puts up on nuget, and blaming him because they’re dense. And has Nick Chapsas constantly flaming him.

Jimmy doesn’t give two fucks. Be like Jimmy.

Fuck this new client.
Can’t go into much detail but if you think you’ve got it bad, think again. This shit show of a client has taken incompetence, micromanagement and chaos to whole new levels.

Ruby development. urrghh

Worst thing in IT you can do is pretend to know what you’re doing when you don’t.

All seems harmless until that person starts resolving git conflicts….. 💣💥

Get a cloud cert and move away from team managing and back to coding - as a freelancer if that’s what it takes

Totally hands off. Haven’t touched code for about 2 months at least. Just concentrating on organising things and meetings.

Manager in latest monthly review : “we’d like you to be more hands off”.

How!?

4.5 months of being tech lead and I think I’ve had enough already and will just go back to being an individual contributor.

Once technical direction is set what remains is coordinating, organising, communicating, documenting. Zero tech’ing.

Turns out it’s dull as fuck most days.
😕

Presenting to the council of elders.
Aka the ARB…of which none of the 25 members are architects or even slightly technical. 😂

So many meetings that we have pre-meeting meetings.
Tomorrow is the best meeting of all - the show and tell, where we can say we spent all sprint in meetings and did no actual work.

I know unit tests and TDD get a bad wrap but I think they’re both great. The problem is people don’t think about what they’re actually coding.

Today I uncovered a unit test with 100 asserts in it.
And half of them are in a loop.

😳

If unit tests weren’t a thing then the dev who wrote this would still be a shit dev.

Senior dev on our team is concerned that we are raising standards above and beyond what we need to deliver the project.

For 6m+ this project has delivered little, but what there is is full of bugs that got through testing, and no standards (coding or otherwise) in place at all.

I hate dealing with people who preach “good enough” is fine but won’t accept they aren’t even close to doing “good enough”

I fucking hate entity framework.
It turns 10 mins of work into fucking hours of stress and bloat and shit.

It’s the one thing in dotnet that I cannot fucking stand.

Literally did a bit of work in 10 mins (using ef I might add), but because it’s not the”ef way” I need to create an extra table/class and then fuck about mapping the relationship in a complicated way to do what I had just done in only a few lines of code with one table.

Spend over an hour trying to get it to understand the relationship before I gave up for the day. Fuck it

Screw it. I’ve gone over to the dark side and become a consultant. Let’s see what life in consultancy brings.

To stay a dev (can do the role with my eyes closed) or take on the architecture role for this company that is sinking like the titanic.

Don’t bother with the hassle (don’t need more money tbh & don’t even know what the money is)?

Take the opportunity while it’s there and get it on my cv?

🤷‍♂️

#question

The number of roles you are expected to do these at this company, to be paid for just one of them.
Business analyst , developer, tester, first line support, architect, devops engineer, recruiter.
And you have the cheek to ask us what we need to keep this shit alive.
(Obviously it’s more people but the answer to that is no).

Fuck right off.
I do not care if this company doesn’t meet its contractual obligations and goes into administration.
It’s not my company, I can walk into another shit company easily, maybe I’ll even get lucky and find a good one.

Why don’t you people at the top who are being paid six figure salaries and telling everyone things are wonderful pull your fingers out of your collective arses and doing what your paid for.
You fuckers deserve all that is coming.

I hate Postman tests.
There has to be a better way of testing a set of apis working together than this clunky unreliable pile of shite

Someone close to Putin needs to put a bullet in his head. They could literally save the world

Being told I’m not experienced enough to get a senior dev job I interviewed for.
Even though I aced the first 4 interview rounds, the tech test feedback was “the best solution they had ever seen”, and I’ve been a senior dev for 25 years.
Time wasting assholes.

Anyone able to recommend the best place to get courses from for working towards an Azure dev cert (or possibly AWS) ?

I’m thinking udemy etc but only ones I’ve ever used are Linkedin Learning and Pluralsight.

I’m going to be paying for these personally so hopefully not too expensive but quality comes before price.

Went to my friends house and he had a new Amstrad CPC464, with ’Oh Mummy’, a Pac-Man close with better music.
Fell in love with computers from the moment I saw it and bought a Spectrum 128k+2 not long after.

This was a long time ago, when I was an 18 year old junior dev in my first job and still studying at college part of the time.

The lead programmer saying things like “we [meaning the experienced devs] are alright if this project goes wrong but you need to prove that you can deliver because you could be out of a job”.
Thanks. Mofo set me right up for lasting confidence issues.

Less than two years later I was killing it when the language they used became object oriented. That asshole couldn’t understand any of the concepts.
That feeing of being out of my depth has lingered though.

Two weeks after being told I’ve got the job I still don’t actually have the actual offer or info on what team I would be joining / role I will be doing.

😡

Meanwhile recruiters are hounding me and other places are interested. Ffs

I’ve become so indecisive in terms of knowing what I want from my career.
All I know is what I don’t want (to end up a in management)

I’m definitely getting a new job and right now it looks like I’ve got 3 offers on the table

Option 1, a previous company I worked for. Still the same problems with the company there as before but the work was interesting and unusual. and my line manager was a good guy.
They have practically no legacy code.
Not much in the way of company benefits but they’re local and it would be nice to see friends again.
So feels like the pull to this is strong.

Option 2, a fully remote company that I’ve been referred to by an ex-workmate.
They’ve not even tech tested me because they’ve read my blogs and GitHub repos instead and said they’re impress. So just had a conversation with them. I feel honoured that they took the time to look at what I’ve done in my own time and use that in their decision.
Benefits are slightly better than option 1 (more hols)
But they’re using .net 6 and get a lot of heavy use on their system and have some big customers. I think the work is integrations to start with and moving services into docker and azure.

Option 3, even though I’ve got an offer from this one but they can’t actually explain the work until We can arrange a call next week (they recruit and then work out what team your in, but Christmas got in the way of me having a call with them straight away)
It’s working on government systems and .net is their least used stack so probably end up switching to Java. Maybe other tech stacks too.
This place has much better benefits than option 1 and 2 (more hols and more pension), but 2 days a week in office.

All of the above pay the same salary.

Having choice feels almost as bad as having no choice.
It’s doing my head in thinking about it , (even tho I might as well not think about it at all until the call with option 3 happens).

On the one hand with option 3, using a tech stack that’s new to me might be refreshing, as I’ve done .net for 10 years.

On the other hand I really like c# and I’m very good at it. So it feels a bit like I should be capitalising on that and using my experience to shape how the dev is done. Not sure I and I can do that with option 3, at least for a while.
C# feels like it’s moving forward nicely and I’m not sure I can say the same for Java or other languages.

I love programming and learning new stuff but so unable to let things go. It’s like I have a fear that c# will move on without me and I’ll end up turning into one of those devs whose skills are a decade out of date.

Maybe the early years of my career formed me in this way.
Early on I worked at a company where there was a high number of Cobol devs who thought they had a job for life.
But then redundancies came and many left. Of those who stayed they had to cross train to Java and they just couldn’t do it.

I don’t think the tech was hard for them, I think they were just so used to not learning that they could no longer adapt.
Think most of them ended up retiring after trying to learn Java for a few years.

Worst was getting head hunted into my current role at this terrific company.
Three months later I’m done with it.
It’s not shit shitty codebase, or the lack of direction that self governing teams have. It’s not the megalomaniac company owner. It’s the bullshit team mobbing and 8 hours of video calls a day.

The best part.
Come he’ll or high water I’m getting myself out before the end of the year.
I’d rather be busy and have f’k all chance of promotion than any more of this. At least the day will fly by.
Just hope I don’t make the same mistake twice, that’s become my biggest worry now.

Head of HR for a company I’ve never heard of has hounded me for days on Cord.io.
I’ve kept fobbing her off and showing disinterest but she kept on about how they’re so interested in talking to me because they need people with my experience. Blah blah.

I finally give in and arrange a call.

First question she asks is “So why do you want to work for us ?”

Wait, what ????
You came to me! I’ve never even heard of this tin shed company.

Need some opinions.
Imagine you’ve got loads of .net + angular under your belt. Like 10+ years.

A new place wants good software engineers from any background but their main thing is Java. So for their new work you will probably be writing it in Java.

Would you turn it down because by this point your specialised in .net.

Or would you be more ‘easy-come-easy-go’ about it and happily learn Java (not too hard) and all the surrounding libraries, toolset (I suspect this is where the effort would be)

I’m kind of of the opinion that switching to a whole other ecosystem might set you back. If you had to put a label on it I would describe it as going from being a senior to a mid-senior.
As you would fall behind with .net but still be trying to up skill in the Java toolset.

And it does feel a bit like learning Java at this point is like learning cobol.

Is my thinking wrong?

“We mob every thing so that means we don’t need pull requests, because by the time the code is committed it’s had plenty of pairs of eyes on it”

Well, I beg to differ.
Today I read through some of this spaghetti mobbed code to look into a performance issue. Wasn’t supposed to but bored stiff so I ‘went dark’ and did it without the mob.

After about an hour I figured out it runs a few lines of dubious code and if there’s an error it tries many times over with an exponential back off.
And each run of the methods will fail for sure because of how it’s written.
Someone must’ve seen this problem but instead of realising it can never work, they’ve wrapped it in retries and back offs.

So many back offs and retries that it just sits there doing this for 25 minutes.

But yeah. The mobbing works great guys, keep churning out this quality code. 😂😂😂
Can’t wait to see the back of this joke job.

Every single morning I despair. I can’t stand this job.
Why pay very highly and get very skilled people to have them working 4 to a support ticket. Doing the most mundane support tickets you have ever seen in your life (mainly updating client contact details)?
And why have such a rigorous recruitment process to get people’s in in the first place?

The company is pissing money away by working like this and all the new starters like me think it’s complete shit.
But the bosses and anyone who’s been here a while think it’s great. Company still is making loads of money so they don’t even care about it.

I’ve never met senior developers who have never worked on a greenfield project in their entire careers until I came here.

I can’t believe how I got suckered into this (was head hunted).

Does anyone have a feel for the UK contracting market right now?

I’m considering the jump but I think I’d have to be looking for remote only contracts because where I live has few opportunities ‘on-site’. Preferably c# / angular.

Is there much competition for roles or is there a shortage of skills in the contractors?

The thought of going into another permanent role that could be as bad as this genuinely keeps me awake at night.
I’m not sure I can go somewhere and then have it in the hands of managers to decide what projects I’m going to do and what tech it will be on.

At any big company there’s going to be tech debt as well as new work. So becoming perm now feels like it’s 50-50 whether or not a new job will just mean being put into legacy stuff for a couple of years or doing something that is actually good.

I’ve been talking various people about roles in government departments (multiple different departments are hiring) and because priorities change none the gov recruiters can guarantee what the work is that they’re recruiting for actually is.
Just that the the big recruitment push is to bring work previously done by consultancies back in house. Presumably because consultancies have been fleecing them.