Hacker News Reader

Comment by warent | Hacker News Reader

This is really sad to hear. I'm curious to know why you have to do the majority of the programming?

It's a security-related task that required deep knowledge of how various parts of the monolith fit together. Half my team -- the side with the other senior dev -- is busy on another even higher priority project. Which leaves me with the choice of explaining to new hires how the system works, or doing it myself. Or really, which takes longer to do. Because of the security implications, I didn't want to take the risk with people who, well, don't have my level of paranoia.

Maybe I should have gone the teaching route, I'd have other people to blame. But a good manager should protect their employees, not the other way around.

Thanks for listening. I guess I'm just complaining on a throwaway because I don't have anyone else to talk to.

always train others

“Effective delegation requires giving up some control of exactly how the work is to be executed.”

I believe the right option would had been to delegate, mentor and trust. Is never too late. Have been in a similar position myself a couple of times...

Don't write another line of code. Setup mob programming with your colleagues and stay away from the keyboard. Instruct them what to do and answer all their questions. It will be slow at first but highly deliberating when they've understood the task and they can be more or less autonomous.

> Which leaves me with the choice of explaining to new hires how the system works

No documentation?

From experience I'd say there doesn't tend to be a great deal of documentation, or up-to-date documentation anyway, on a large monolith application.

Good software engineers are not necessarily good writers, so even when there is documentation it's not always helpful either. Especially to completely new people in a project without background information. For security related work, how much background can you assume? How in-depth does the documentation have to be? etc etc..

Documentation, even when it's there, doesn't always fix this.

Handing documentation over the wall is usually a futile exercise anyway. Documentation should be usually be pair-written by a knowledgable person and a newbie.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com