Should I stay idle when there's no stories assigned for this sprint? I have not had much stories assigned since I joined about 4 months ago. Team lacks resources and has gone through several reorgs with ppl leaving, it's a very politics heavy toxic team, as manager and skip controls by excluding certain teammates from doing high priority projects, and team is stupidly looking to hire another 4 ppl?? Only 2 people in the team are super busy with their stories and remaining 3 of us don't get much work to do. What could be done? Should I be worried about this situation? I was thinking of just doing some training, maybe learn a new techstack. Anybody has been in similar? I am also starting think maybe this is what software engineers do in banks. We really dont have work to do but manager keeps gaslighting saying "we have alot of work to do" (she drank the kool-aid 🤣) And, I'm SO HAPPY she is leaving to different team next month. # toxicmanager #toxicskip #selfishteammates TC 140k LCOL 2.9yoe
This is very normal in Banks and any financial institutions. Only the SCM and the audit parts are critical. Not following the protocol is worst than not working at all.
Wdym? The political protocol?
Sounds about right. You can work on aws certification, leadership programs such as LEAP. There is also a leetcode symphony channel.
Wow! I tried go/leetcode but didn't exist lol Thanks
idk what your team is like but if I run out of tasks I talk to the guy in charge of the sprints and ask him what backlog tickets I should take. seems pretty obvious to me
here I am having worked 80 hour weeks in 2021 for less than that TC. Reduced it to maybe 50 hrs in 2022. Now trying to reduce it to under 40.
I’m in a very similar situation but I think this is actually a good thing. You get paid for doing nothing. It’s the sweetest deal. Also after bonus season, I found out that the amount of work doesn’t even impact your bonus that much . That’s because bonus for tech division is shit for everyone, so those developers who are doing high priority projects would probably get 5k more than you for a whole year of busy work. Also, our new hires don’t have work to do for over three months, yet our VP asked for 15 new headcount and got approved. This is essentially because the VP wants MD promotion and they’re trying to exaggerate their impacts by having more engineers report to them. When a VP has 50+ people report to them, their name will appear on MD promo waitlist even though those 50 people aren’t doing shits ( FYI that VP still didn’t get MD promo this year so this trick didn’t work so well ) These are all typical bank politics tricks. Those people have been in banks for over 15 years, they practically invented all these tricks lol
Thanks now I'm understanding why skip is still looking to get 4 more ppl on our team plus make 2 more new scrum teams!! We're all going to getting free checks
LOB?
CCB digital acount opening and activation, whatever that shit means
You mentioned the two of your teammates are really busy. Have you asked them if there are any small tasks that you can take off their plate? That could be a good way to learn the code base.
As I mentioned, team is heavily controlled. Manager and skip asks teammates not to share, etc So I have quit trying to ask them, cause they wouldn't share it unless they get some kind of order from skip or manager. But also even if they do, they lazily just give some bs nobody would understand
That's because you are new to team
There is always stuff like fixing tests, improving CICD, upgrading libraries, performance tuning, bug fixing, monitoring, getting off legacy hardware, documentation, training users, project planning. Talk to your users and see if they're happy with how the system works. I don't know how anyone can ever say there is nothing to do.
If manager deliberately tries to alienate a new hire, then the new hire isn’t even given access to the codebase and existing code documentations. This happened to me when I joined. Wherever I go (confluence, Jira, gitlab etc) there’s a warning message saying I’m blocked access and I should ask XXX VP for approval. And that VP wouldn’t grant me access for months even when I explicitly made the request. The VP would just say “the approval progress is slow” but if they really want to grant approval they could have done it in 10 minutes ( seen it happen when they have an urgent task ). Also, we don’t even know who our users are. Only managers know their names and we are excluded from all user meeting Looks like you haven’t seen real Goldman politics. It’s real hazing and it’s very terrifying
Yuo, that's the right word, manager has been alienating me and this created a selfish unhealthy environment for our team. She has also alienated a senior associate swe and I'm so sad he will be leaving as he got another offer from external. He was the only person trying make things right and not involve in politics. Why do the good ones always leave??!
Work on Operational Excellence
Wtf is that?
I love how you're on 140k and don't know what that is