1. SDEs who lie, don’t help others, take time from you and don’t give credit, make noise to show impact on every details. 2. Ambiguity and managing expectation in a project that needs understanding of other teams' services and do implementation there. Management asks for progress, ETA and needs to provide updates in standup. On top multiple other priorities come ad hoc (helping junior SDEs and oncall, meetings and prep for that (reading for context), business and tech emails (needs deep dive and provide explanation/numbers)). 3. Non tech leadership who thinks SDEs have bandwidth in current Sprint and can do design in couple days without knowing much about systems and complexities. 4. SDEs who underestimate tasks and give low estimates and can’t complete (provides other reasoning at the end)/overwork to complete.
I remind myself it's a job and I'll likely jump ship in a couple years anyways. Dodge these people as much. These problems are not worth solving. Btw you are spot on, these issues looks like my daily schedule
1. Document, document, document your work exhaustively, and make it part of your EOY review documentation. 2. Overcommunicate to your management. Loop them into any communication you have with external teams. Do not for any reason keep them in the dark. Again, document your work and share with your manager what you’re doing in your weekly 1:1s (you have those, right? If not, request them and do it now). Make sure you’re delivering value against management objectives and if you’re not, ask your management if you should really be continuing those work activities. 3. Not much more to say here other than your manager needs to be your advocate in this situation, and to do that he needs the information you possess. 4. Not sure about this one. In my experience SDEs tend to overestimate tasks. I dunno. Maybe take a closer look at team performance over time and look to see if you come in over/under and adjust estimates accordingly.
If an SDE underestimates then overworks to complete on time, did they really underestimate? 🤔
It sets toxic environment for teams. For example, work and raise CRs on weekends and ping for reviews. Other SDEs feel that have to work on weekends and nights.
Ok fair - I assumed only he was required to overwork outside regular business hours, not others. You need to speak up when doing time estimates to share your concern, and use previous cases as example. “Last time you said two weeks, but it took an SDE being pinged for a code review on a weekend to get there which is unreasonable. Should we add a buffer?”
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Try to understand how each of those people view the situation, achieve empathy. Then when they feel understood, I share my perspective. That’s at least the first step. Once I better understand how our views are different and the same I can make better decisions and build better context and teamwork, or know when to not bother.