Comment by eloycoto | Hacker News Reader

Comment by eloycoto | Hacker News Reader

I'm in the middle of this problem and not sure If I'm doing something wrong.

In the next month we are going to launch a new product, I'm full stack dev and I'm bit frustrated with my colleagues. I did all the devops and all developers(5) has his vagrant per branch, each vagrant box is deployed in one box so they can show to another colleague without trouble (I built a server with the subdomain with the $TASK-ID.subdomain) and the workflow is correct for all of them and they are happy. To deploy to staging/prod we have a full terraform + consul so we're in a happy place.

In terms of code this is painful, they didn't make any test, I made around 50 test 1 month ago to show to them how to make test, but in one month, only one test was added in the project. In terms of the code-review they complain about good indention, and each time that they made a Pull-Request (pep8 and pyflakes) is not passed, and they use to complain about it. They use to mark task as resolved before code got merged, things to weird that I can't explain.

I tried to explain why things need to change, I made a workflow in plantuml and they are complaining that it's too difficult. I'm the only one that made commits in the docs folder.

Nowadays I'm thinking to switch to another company, but I'm happy with my manager (He is too honest), but the team is killing me, and I don't feel comfortable with them, I rarely learn from them and they don't want to do things better, they only want to work to raise money.

This is a dead battle? Or can I fix this?

You can fix it but it will take time and you will need to be very patient.

(1) let go of your frustration, it is not helping you, if you can't GOTO 3.

(2) pick the best of your colleagues and try to lift him/her up to your level with arguments, not with force (this will take time and oceans of patience)

(3) if that does not work, start looking for other employment, no matter how much you like your boss

(4) if it does work, then now you have a buddy, who already knows your method works, rinse and repeat at (2) until you've either had enough of it or you find that you now have a well oiled team.

Good luck! (You'll need it, this is not an easy thing to do). And if you manage to make this work you are management material yourself.

I think it's not clear if he is the project manager or not. If he has a project manager, then we have to ask why he isn't helping focus the team. Or are they are product a team that is expected to organize themselves.

I agree strongly with #1.

#2 I think it might be good to approach it by asking more questions. If people say it is hard, ask how can we achieve the goal of writing more tests without it being a burden? Maybe OP is perceived as pushy if he's not the manager, or he doesn't allow for enough input on how the process evolves if he is the manager.

Hey,

Not I'm not project manager, I'm single remote dev. My manager try to the other devs write test, but they said to him that is impossible or too complex. So at that time I spend 2 days and I wrote the test and I wrote a long email with links, howtos, benefits, etc.. Nowadays they still say that it's too complex and no value added. My manager can't say test in all places: they complain about it and I tried the #2 but it didn't work.

#2 worked well with the vagrant box, at first days was too complex, now they loved.. but with test and pep8 code style is a long battle. I think that I'm trying to change how they use to work, and they don't want to change how they work.

I always use to explain that, as a friend, is good for all, but I can't get it.

#1 Yes, me too, but when you reviewed 18 PR in 2 days without good code indention, half of them didn't work and 70% was mark as resolved in the task-manager I need to run a marathon every morning to keep away my frustration. Maybe was that last week I was on holidays and these days I only fixed problems.

I didn't realize it was remote. I think that changes things, since it's difficult to nail the relationship-building part as a remote worker. I think communication is going to be the biggest challenge, particularly if different people don't speak English as their first language.

An email with links and explanations might just fly over the head of a lot of people. One approach I used when working remotely is making short videos, or walking people through things using something like TeamViewer.

You seem to love tools.

Tools are an important part to help a team execute a process, and you even seem to have devised processes ("a workflow"), but obviously you've got no buy-in from the team.

Aim lower. Take your colleagues with you. Step by step. And yes, at first it won't be all "good" in your opinion, simply "a little bit better".

But it seems to me you're trying to impose your ideas in a dictatorial style on everyone else, and at that point you'll meet lots of (ultimately unnecessary) resistance, just because they are uncomfortable with you bossing them around.

I don't think you're going to get a satisfactory answer from HN but I'll try.

It's probably easiest to start with your manager and talk over these problems. Consider how your manager works:

Is he a data kind of guy? Show him how writing tests reduces bugs in the future and speeds development time. How will your changes allow you to ship more features or fix more bugs in the future?

Is he trying to make everybody on the team happy? Ok, see if you can get a few of the more senior people together on the team and talk over the problem in meeting and get everyone to agree on an incremental plan moving forward.

Is your team the kind that tends to hang out together after work? Go out with them once a week, see if you can bring this up in the group casually.

Maybe your boss thinks everything is fine and will only listen if you make more noise? Go into his office and be more direct about the problems you're having.

This also applies to the rest of the team. Consider that they may not see the problems with the project in the same way as you. That's not a bad or good thing, it's just that all people are different. You sound like you're frustrated because it's clear from the facts that there are not enough tests and your team's processes are not being followed. The rest of the team might think that "good enough" is all that is required, and adding more work (even if it reduces workload down the road) isn't a "nice" thing to do.

> I rarely learn from them and they don't want to do things better, they only want to work to raise money.

This is an opportunity for you to learn from them! It's just in areas that you may not be thinking about.

If something is the best way to do, then the one who is proposing it has to convince others usually. More often its about showing them how it can save lots of time in the future. But the reality is that people don't want to spend time unless it has a big business impact and the time it takes to learn/modify is justified by the cost.

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