Hacker News Reader

Comment by NAHWheatCracker | Hacker News Reader

Just today, my team had a developer meeting.

The tech lead started out by complaining about how he has to do an untested unplanned release today because another team made some urgent changes. He's the only person who knows how to release it. The other team didn't communicate until today that a release is necessary.

We've done two other releases in the past month and both required a day of troubleshooting to fix issues.

Both of us have been working at this company for about 3 years and we both have over a decade of experience in software development.

When he finished complaining, I started asking questions and making suggestions about how we can improve things. - Push back on the team that needs these urgent changes. Let them learn to do the release. - Deny the release since they didn't communicate earlier. - Improve the release process.

Everything I suggested was just flatly denied as impossible. - The other team doesn't know how to do the release. - He wants to be a "team player" so he can't deny the release. - Project managers will never allocate time to improve the release process.

I feel strange because I've seen this same thing for my whole career and I still try fight for what's right when others appear to moan and carry on.

However, my experience tells me that bringing this stuff to my manager is even worse. My manager doesn't know anything about the code, my project, or the release project. He may assume it's complaining for the sake of complaining. It has been used as ammunition in reviews against me.

Learned helplessness sucks and I wish I could do more. I don't think either of the suggestions in the article are feasible for many ICs. Teams are ambivalent to making improvements, and retrospectives carry very little weight. Managers are above the fray and won't be held responsible for by people below them.

View on HN

The tech lead started out by complaining about...When he finished complaining...

My manager doesn't know anything about the code, my project, or the release project.

IOW, your team has no leadership and no management. Your team lead may be called that, but sounds like he doesn't lead at all. Your manager may be called that, but he doesn't manage either. This happens a lot when people are given responsibility without any authority (probably the case for you "team lead"), or authority over things they don't understand (probably the case for your "manager").

The bad news is that you're part of a disorganized mob. The good news is that there is a leadership vacuum that, if you play your cards right, you could fill. If you want. Of course, even if you succeed, it's possible no one will care about your accomplishments. And you will probably make enemies. It's possible you'll be rewarded but given your description, I view that as unlikely.

As a side note, suggesting to the team lead that he lead and do X, Y or Z may appear to him as if you want him to take on risks with little upside. He's probably thought about doing those things anyway but just decided it's not worth the trouble. It's not all that surprising that he doesn't want to rock the boat.

This resonated strongly with me.

If you don't want to become a leader, what do you do in a disorganized mob situation? Leave?

Find the/a leader, make sure they can secure your interests, empower them?

Unless you're being paid to coach the leader, this is just work their boss should be doing and which you're doing for free.

Right.

They asked what can you do besides leaving.

Should just leave.

not every situation can be fixed

Most often the answer is yes, unfortunately. If you have options make use of them.

If you have to stay, it helps to try and make your team a nice place to be. I remember a manager that would organize team lunches and would give Fridays off (unofficially) making the team an oasis in the middle of a corporate desert. But I can’t imagine it was easy for him to deal with a dysfunctional leadership and coworkers…

Sometimes there is someone else who wants to lead but can't due to political reasons. You can try supporting them. Little things like seconding someone's ideas can go a long way. At least in the place I work at.

Take the stoical approach. Focus on what's in within your locus of control and ignore everything else.

I've come to the same conclusion in recent years. What you can do is optimize your end of work so the dysfunction impacts you less and less. Alot of work is really just BS that nobody wants to touch, but ends up on somebody's desk. Someone just has to bite that apple and document the hell out of it, make playbooks, automate and delegate. You can get management support for putting responsibility where it should be ("shift left"), while you answer questions, direct people to references and generally empower those around you.

So either you become your island and power on from your base, or you become part of the dysfunction as a leader. Leaders who succeed in this are rare enough they write books about it, most of it fiction..

There is often room for personal initiative in such cases; do what you can, make sure to not try to do more than you can, and be happy with it.

> The good news is that there is a leadership vacuum that, if you play your cards right, you could fill. If you want.

Perhaps. I thought so once in exactly this situation, and it led to an incredible amount of frustration, and burnout. And others were hurt the same way. That leadership vacuum was very real, but nobody wanted it to be filled by anyone already in the company, it turned out.

Eventually we got a very competent new team lead from outside and he was accepted by everyone immediately. For one of the teams anyway; the other one is still a complete mess. I just make sure I'm on the right one.

Unfortunately this. I really like how you have articulated the problem. Disorganized mob. This mob also loves moving from one team to another inside the company once they deem to think they exhaust the resources in the former and once the product is dead. I think it happens sooner or later in enterprise. It sucks.

What is the difference between your team lead's bad reasons not to push internally for a better system:

> The other team doesn't know how to do the release.

> He wants to be a "team player" so he can't deny the release.

> Project managers will never allocate time to improve the release process.

and your good reasons not to push internally for a better system?

> My manager doesn't know anything about the code, my project, or the release project.

> He may assume it's complaining for the sake of complaining.

> It has been used as ammunition in reviews against me.

The last bullet of each scenario is fundamentally different, and the ammunition bit is the most important part.

I do push for changes, such as bringing ideas to the team lead and bringing these things up with my manager (hence being brought up in reviews).

There is a self-reinforcing aspect to learned helplessness in teams, as you've pointed out.

In my experience, this sort of thing is why good leadership has an outsized impact.

All you have to do is say no once in a while.

No, don't bring the company to a halt with a tantrum. Just insist on getting one thing fixed a month and nine months from now everyone will be a lot happier.

Can't teach everyone to have a backbone. Heck, nerds are infamous for being easy to manipulate.

Anecdotally, the most manipulative individual I've ever met was a nerd.

Who better to profit off of nerds? It's not like there is any kind of solidarity or union among techies.

> All you have to do is say no once in a while...

> Just insist...

Some companies work like this, but many don't. Such utterances could be charting a course to the door for you.

Plenty of openings out there. Not worth suffering to get a 2% raise rather than 1%. If they won't let you fix something once a month it's time to get moving.

Learned helplessness, indeed.

It isn't learned helplessness if you are actually helpless.

The whole point of the article is that the vast majority of engineering teams have some power. It's not a license to derail the company with technical OCD, but as in all things… "balance, grasshopper."

Yes, there is 1% who can't follow that advice for various reasons of desperation. Not enough to continue arguing this thread.

> All you have to do is say no once in a while.

Being able to say "no" is absolutely critical.

Of course, you do incur a risk and you may fail or hurt your career in that org up to the point of termination even if you're "right". Moreover your follow-up after saying "no" will be judged harshly and silently for every little snag, real or not.

But that's part of the deal, right? It's not easy, if it were easy you'd have dream-teams all over the place rather than an industry where occupational dysfunction is normal.

The team lead seems to carry a lot but has a certain "job safety", so no incentive to share the release process.

In fact the team leader is a "hero" who extinguished a fire caused by other department.

I've worked on a good number of teams just like yours. I always told myself things would be different when I was in charge. Then I was in charge.

I learned pretty early on that I have political capital, and very little of it. Instead, I have to have a manager that's pretty buck wild when I tell them I need them to be, and I have to deliver them some wins that will grease their wheels too. Good managers are hard to come by though, and if they get noticed they're promoted and gone in a couple of years.

Personally, I think the transactional nature of software positions is what largely holds us back. If I get promoted, then there'll be a new lead, and this cycle will start all over again.

Did you make your situation clear to your team? I find that is the biggest source of frustration.

Yes. Most of my leadership skills come from the Marines. I'm a fairly blunt leader, so if we're facing something the team is aware of that I can't do anything about then I'm pretty frank about it. Some folks don't like that too much, but I'd rather not have those kind of secrets on a team.

Doing a good job - and staying where you are - doesn't get you more reward. And people generally want more than they currently have.

This hit so close to home for me. At my last two jobs, I've simply burnt out from hitting this sort of wall over and over.

    Everything I suggested was just flatly 
    denied as impossible 

    [...]

    I feel strange because I've seen this same thing 
    for my whole career and I still try fight for 
    what's right when others appear to moan and carry on.

For anybody (100% rightfully!) wondering if it's my fault: (1) I've been consistently praised in reviews as a good communicator (2) I always operate by the maxim "don't just complain -- instead, offer solutions" and I see that you do too. (edit: That's not to say that I couldn't be communicating things better. Certainly, I don't believe I've reached some level of perfection there)

I think the reality is that this kind of change can't originate from the in-the-trenches folks at the bottom of totem pole. Management will never let individuals waver from their short term goals.

The only times I've seen developer pain-points successfully addressed in a sustainable way, it's because there was a dedicated team allocated to that sort of thing: a "developer experience" team, or some equivalent.

(Although, the issues you ran into are kind of an org issue in addition to a developer experience issue)

>I think the reality is that this kind of change can't originate from the in-the-trenches folks at the bottom of totem pole.

I'm a manager. Please. PLEASE don't believe this. In-the-trenches folks ARE powerful. Really. I promise. I can't implement change if YOU don't do it. I don't know what sucks if YOU don't tell me.

I NEED you to help me make things better.

Hiring Rails devs? I'll work for you!

Seriously, though: I firmly believe that most managers do think and act like you do.

(I've been in lead and/or management-lite roles myself; I don't view management as some weird or evil "other")

But, I think it only works if that sort of change is valued all the way up the org chart and folks at each level are empowered, incentivized, and motivated to address the pain points of the folks below.

If the org chart is more than N levels deep, then I think this becomes practically impossible. Managers feel the pain of their direct reports deeply and acutely and absolutely want to make things better: after all, it is in their best interests as well. But a manager won't feel or even understand the challenges of folks N levels below; it's probably not even practical to expect this.

(I'll let others argue over the exact value of N above)

That's why I don't think the situation can be resolved without some sort of dedicated resources allocated to developer experience. The most obvious answer (for engineering orgs big enough to support it) would be dedicated developer experience teams. For teams that lack the headcount to dedicate engineers to it full time, an alternate solution could be dedicated chunks of time -- "hackathon Fridays", etc.

I‘m working in a strongly hierarchical org, whit very high N number. What shocking me and blocked good ideas or solutions is that: The persons in charge, empowered to make decisions are so far from reality. And the outcome of their decisions has no effect on their lives… And not because they are evil, just unable to understand the problem. (Once some guy asked, why we put bugs in the code…) Now I fight to change this doing a half management half coder job. But thats hard, I am close to total burnout…

    I‘m working in a strongly hierarchical org, 
    whit very high N number

    The persons in charge, empowered to make 
    decisions are so far from reality

Yeah. I've seen it happen when managers are literally just a level or two up and don't come from an engineering background.

I think it's inevitable, honestly. I think it's fundamentally impossible for management to really understand or respond to in-the-trenches stuff. That's like tasking the mayor of a large city with sweeping the streets or physically fighting crime themselves, in person. They literally cannot spend enough hours in the shoes of the folks under them to understand that stuff.

And, that's fine. Management just needs to have the humility to understand that, and has to empower people/groups that do have their boots on the ground to fix those problems.

It's not unique to this industry, although I do think the newness and explosive growth of our industry may make it particularly prone to this kind of thing.

I see your point. In my BigCo I don’t see real empowering. I agree with you this is a key factor.

My dilemma should I leave or not? Is it better or worse in other place? My helplessness is, I reached limits where I know I can‘t improve the situation anymore. But I see a general pattern and so I am pessimistic to find a better place…

Please don't invalidate other people's experiences.

that's a two-way street

Expect to be wrong when speaking on other people's behalf against their interests.

If you however, do something about it, that counts for something. Not just asking others to do your job for you, without even asking them.

>The only times I've seen developer pain-points successfully addressed in a sustainable way, it's because there was a dedicated team allocated to that sort of thing: a "developer experience" team, or some equivalent.

I came to this conclusion after watching the place I work at for 2 and a half years fail to implement any of the grand ambitions management had in their heads. We wanted code review, pull requests, build pipelines, automated releases, updated OS's, logging, disaster recovery, you name it. No one had the experience, time, or energy to implement it, so it falls on one or two juniors (me) to quickly learn and implement while learning. No one is hired with experience in any of these topics, only fresh-grads that will replicate the garbage you're trying to get away from are hired, because they will on paper be producing more features for less financial cost.

I think they key is to find people who have put effort into figuring out what good is, and are frustrated and care enough to enact change.

Similarly to your org not having a dedicated DX team being the reason, dedicated teams will happily dissapear into a void of non-delivery as their purist vision, unconnected with reality, will simply never apply to your stack, and thus you'll never use it.

End of the day, different things work and fail. The key is almost always the quality of people, their motivation and how many road blocks you put in front of them.

     dedicated teams will happily dissapear 
     into a void of non-delivery as their purist vision

I've sort of seen that happen, but of all the issues being discussed, that seems the easiest to avoid.

1. Rotate team members onto and off of the DX team, so they don't lose touch with reality.

and/or

2. Have the rest of developers vote (or otherwise have direct input on) on the DX team's priorities and products. The other developers are the stakeholders here.

  > because they will on paper be producing more features for less financial cost.

And from a business perspective, that is the correct choice.

So make a better business case. Inform them that after investing Y hours on refactoring X, future development is expected to happen M% faster with N% less bugs. New features can be expected to be developed, tested, and shipped to production in S% less time.

But be realistic. Don't make promises that you won't actually meet when the time comes.

You're making this sound simpler than it is, I think. For the following discussion assume we're talking about management that is smart and wants the dev team(s) to succeed but is racing hard to hit various external deadlines and does not have a technical background.

    Inform them that after investing Y hours on 
    refactoring X, future development is expected 
    to happen M% faster with N% less bugs.

I've tried variations of this to sporadic effect. My elevator pitch is/was essentially, "let's devote 10% of our developer resources to making the other 90% more productive, rather than having 100% of our developers suffer these slowdowns and problems."

(I chose 10% because we had 30 developers at the time and generally had teams of 3 developers. So, one dedicated DX team...)

Do you have any articles, case studies, etc of how to express this to management that is generally oblivious to the day-to-day, in-the-trenches, experiences and pain points of developers?

What you're saying sounds great to me, who is a developer, but how would you come up with halfway realistic numbers for Y and X?

The best thing I could think to do is have the team minutely log all lost minutes productivity caused by delays and inefficiencies that the proposed fixes could address.

But even that's tricky. For example, at one of my previous positions, the build pipeline could take hours and could randomly fail.

The only way to maintain any semblance of productivity would be to juggle 3-4 tickets at once. This was incredibly challenging, and productivity took a massive hit due to the frustration and context switching.

However, even if I had logged those experiences down to the minute, there weren't any literal downtime minutes. It was more a matter of juggling five tickets at once that should have taken one hour each, but instead they took five hours each because I was context switching faster than the Linux kernel itself.

    New features can be expected to be developed, 
    tested, and shipped to production in S% less time.

This sounds good to me, a developer but again, I'm not sure how to express this to management. It's not like "one feature" is some standard unit of measurement - the time to shipping "one feature" varies by orders of magnitude.

Scrum and its much-maligned "story points" are a possible solution here, as far as management is concerned, assuming both developers and management have bought into that concept and are using it correctly.

  > Do you have any articles, case studies, etc of how to express this to management that is
  > generally oblivious to the day-to-day, in-the-trenches, experiences and pain points of developers?

It is the "generally oblivious" that is the problem. Log holdups whenever a ticket takes significantly longer than the estimate. And be specific as to what the holdup was.

  > What you're saying sounds great to me, who is a developer, but how would you come up with halfway realistic numbers for Y and X?

The same way that I come up with halfway realistic numbers for any other dev work. I pull it out of my donkey. Then double it.

  > The best thing I could think to do is have the team minutely log all lost minutes productivity
  > caused by delays and inefficiencies that the proposed fixes could address.

Yes, log it! It does not have to be by the minute. Honestly, if the holdups are only causing minutes of delays, then they're not so bad unless your ticket take only minutes to complete anyway. My general rule is to log any holdup of more than half an hour, or more than 10% of the time estimated to develop a feature/bugfix. Very loosely, of course.

This is why I .. struggle to function in society. There are tribal forces at play that are beyond me. Or require me to play games I don't want to play.

Social tissue is a strange medium and most of the time it's a friction generating engine. People complain, time passes on, nothing happens, repeat.

None of these are games: they're really just an expression of the energy you need to spend to change a rigid structure. And the more rigid, the more energy, just like a metal bar you'd be trying to fold.

You can change things but you must do it. You must put your reputation at risk, expense time that you wont be compensated for, go through conflicts you'd rather avoid, make lifelong enemies wether you succeed or not. Then, you changed the rigid structure once more and the next guy will either try to put it back where it was and face less resistance or fold it one more time and face even more.

You cannot teach a rigid structure agility just like you cannot teach iron to be silk, and the structure is rigid for a reason: size, cost, regulation, cultural beliefs, rot due to time, past mistakes (in my experience the largest factor: a mistake 10 years ago can justify 3 days a week of useless processes today) etc. You can change the structure but it's CEO-level work to change its rigidity.

Well first of all I don't consider work groups as solids, it's more like a non newtonian fluid.

And reputation, enemies.. all of these are absurd notions to me. It mostly shows immaturity in our notion of work and society. And I'm not asking for people to find solution to state finance, but even for changing the simplest thing, people will resort to primitive behavior. It's child like behavior mostly.. and the bad side of childhood, not the "let's make something fun for everybody" more like "boss doesnt like me so i wont move a finger". In those structures everybody becomes everybody's enemy, and it's a super sad sight.

This strikes a chord with me.

Ironically, the only way to minimize the "game playing" is by mastering them. There will always be people out there whose only real skill is manipulating the people around them, and who will deploy that skill at full force.

I'm not saying you should manipulate the people around you... but the twin powers of, "understanding whats going on around you" and "documenting everything", go a long way.

Yes.. I came to a similar sad realization. Either understand the game better or somehow treat people like confused scared kids posturing.

I also try to distill good vibes and motivation, bit by bit. Listening, suggesting, showing.

I've asked a few places but I've been looking for the social dynamics of work groups.

This article helped me to understand "the game" a little better. https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/07/the-gervais-principle-...

I've read these articles back and forth and I honestly cannot grasp more than 30% of the ideas. The loser eludes me, the middle layer same..

I'd love to poke in people's head to be sure what are the motives behind their behavior (the main one I assume being a balance of respect/equality and money).

> I'd love to poke in people's head to be sure what are the motives behind their behavior

I suspect you're approaching things too logically. In my experience most people do something then rationalize why they've done that later, if at all. And that's without any perceptive, or memory problems or anything like that, and assumes good intent-- which a lot of people don't have.

I also suspect some people's brains work so differently from my subjective experience that there's effectively no way to understand them.

A very hard lesson for me was "don't try to use logic to understand irrational people."

I now tend to think of people in terms of, "can I predict a response or action by them?" By observation, you can kind of build a set of rules and start hypothesizing about them and update your model when you get more evidence. But you still need to be mindful that different conclusions can be reached with different or conflicting information.

It worked so well on an ex of mine that she thought I was spying on her somehow, because I often had reasoned out things I shouldn't have known. The most terrible example-- that she was cheating on me. I came to this conclusion from a few bits of evidence-- she wasn't really the curious type. Most of the film, music, etc she knew about were from me. And then one day, she started talking in detail about a film I knew she hadn't seen, and she used a word I had never heard her use before.

This lead me to think, "She's having some sort of social interactions that I'm unaware of, and they're probably watching movies together, and if its being kept secret, its probably something bad."

And I was correct.

That's too cold an approach for me

I'd rather try to connect emotionally and see who's responding. I grew up the way you think and I'm tired of it. If someone doesn't like me (or doesn't like me anymore), no problem, then I'll find other people, all I want is honesty.

That said, I've encountered the post rationalizing lying kind just too many times.. :)

I understand your feelings but I'm not saying you should do this with everyone-- just problematic or difficult people.

Boy, this resonated.

I left my last contracting project around six weeks ago because of encountering this attitude - yet again.

I wrote my first custom business program 40 years ago. Since then, I've only been on two teams that didn't exhibit this attitude.

At this point, I really don't want to continue programming for a living, precisely because so many people adamantly refuse to fix problems with painfully obvious (and quick and cheap) solutions.

I've given up on trying to get people to change their behavior. If I do continue programming, my approach will be to try to find one of those rare teams that actually changes and improves.

I mean, after 40 years as a programmer, can't you retire or look for a better lower paying job?

A hazard of meetings is that the best debater owns the show. It's quite possible that the tech lead thought his idea was straightforward enough that he didn't expect it to be debated, and wasn't prepared for it.

I don't introduce new information at meetings unless I am ready to back it up, which usually takes an hour of preparation for every hour of meeting. If time is of the essence, it's often better to settle things in hallway conversations or via web chat.

> that bringing this stuff to my manager is even worse ...

This.

While I currently have a manager that mostly understands such complaints, I have learned that even then, it amounts to nothing. Because he can't change material things without invoking higher-ups, and they won't be brought on board. For one thing because that would require a lower level manager to create tasks for a higher manager. And that's not how management works in many companies: A lower level manager didn't get to be a lower level manager by creating "work" for higher-ups. He got to be a lower level manager by absorbing the complaints from the ground force, assuring them that their voice is heard while at the same time shielding the higher-ups.

Maybe I've just been in sh*tty IT companies all my life, but I'm seeing this, and similar pattern for nearly 30 years now, and that's why I'm now searching for a job that is as far away from the potential to create overbearing complexity as possible. Even to be point where salary be damned.

> It has been used as ammunition in reviews against me.

Quit. This is a sign of a broken and unfixable workplace.

You don’t know other aspects about his job. If the work is easy and the pay is good there’s no point in quitting unless you aren’t working from home or there’s a substantially better offer.

They're mentioning it here as though they're unhappy. Doesn't sound like someone that's beneficial for them outside of funds, if anything.

> My manager doesn't know anything about the code, my project, or the release project.

What... does he know?

Fine, he doesn't get into the code itself. But the project and its dependencies? Yikes.

He's the scrum master for other projects and he deals with things like hiring.

This is the current norm.

Most Tech Directors or Tech Managers at my massive media company were previously front end or full stack devs who were good at coordinating (asking questions and never internalizing the answers).

Since they talk to so many people and have great rapports, they can easily manage people and conversations but they cannot manage a technical system because they think they can negotiate with it.

Usually the shit they need to know is 2 bash scripts and what build is in what env. Simple enough if you are so well educated with a degree and half a brain.

So he is HR and not a manager? A manager can evaluate your performance, if he doesn't know what you are working on then he isn't a manager. Whoever is evaluating what you do is your manager. If nobody is doing that then congratulations, you don't have a manager, you work in a so called self organizing team!

Yeah, I'd hard pass on the scrum master picking colleagues.

If the person hiring isn't technical, they likely aren't qualifying competancy, nor are they likely capable of building an Engineering culture.

Can't your tech lead suggest that he'll do the release under the condition that someone from that other team pairs with him so that they learn how to do it?

This seems like a really good idea.

Yeah, at a previous job, I had inherited responsibility for maintaining a particular poorly tested (and hard to test—lots of API dependencies), widely-used library. Most changes were contributed by users and I managed by reviewing new code and tests as carefully as I could.

At one point, one particularly hard-pressed user wanted to make really sweeping changes to the library and had limited time. I stalled and stalled to try and review all their changes and convince myself they were going to work, and they got more and more agitated, and my TL (who was himself frustrated by how much of my time this was consuming) told them "you can merge whatever you want if you take over maintaining it". So that's what happened, and everybody left happy.

The tech lead wants to be “a hero”. It’s a common theme, the problems are well known when you have ppl hero-balling.

He actually called himself out for this during the conversation. I'm not sure how to convince someone to stop doing that.

Demean the work, don't say anything about him but minimize the value of what he is doing. Commiserate how bad it is that he has to waste a day doing something with so little value. Be on their "side" but make it clear you "understand" what they are doing isn't valuable.

All of these comments should be said in group setting to try and get the crowd to pickup similar views. Just make sure no one thinks of what they are doing in a positive light.

That sounds like a really toxic way to handle the situation.

I regularly re-read the opening few pages of the Pragmatic Programmer as a mantra to myself, because what you have written here is very relevant.

> It is your life. You own it. You run it. You create it.

> Many developers we talk to are frustrated. Their concerns are varied. [...] And the answer we give is always the same.

> "Why can't you change it?"

> But, for some reason, developers seem to resist change. They hunker down, and hope things will get better.

> [...]

> So here's the most important tip in the book.

> Tip 3: You Have Agency

> Does your environment suck? Is your job boring? Try to fix it. But don't try forever. As Martin Fowler says, "You can change your organization, or you can change your organization."

When I read the situation you describe, the best thing would be to acknowledge where the tech lead is emotionally, and sympathize, because it sounds like they simply wanted to sound off about it, not actually change it at all. It's always easy to say no to why something won't work, and it sounds like a classic drama triangle situation, with someone coming in as a persecutor, you stepped in as a potential rescuer, then you became a victim because obviously your suggestions won't work.

You, however, don't need to accept the situation, and you can try to change it if you wish. Too many people (including myself, hence why I always re-read those few lines) fall into the trap of thinking that someone else should make this or that change, make a decision, or that you require approval or authority. This is far less true than people believe.

As someone who has stepped into a software manager role for the first time from being a software engineer for most of my career, my view is that I'm not always there to solve the problem, but to give space for people to solve the problems themselves. It helps if I know what's going on, or understand the issues, but I trust my team, and those I work with, and would rather get them together with the right people to discuss it through, and work out a way forward.

I appreciate I don't know the situation at your organization, the battles you fought, the things that have been said. Change is never easy, and there's always resistance, but you do have agency, as does your tech lead. Never forget it. Good luck.

I’ve been there. It sounds like you’re starting to blame yourself for their failings. You’re not sure if you’re a little crazy or they are. They’re gaslighting you. Get. Out. As. Soon. As. Possible.

If they’re using your valid concerns as issues on performance reviews, then the company values making low quality software, not their employees. Get out of the sausage factory and get into a place that values their employees and product. You’ll be much happier.

For a person of many years of experience your friend is the problem. He has agreed to push untested code which is his responsibility, enabled other teams to work out of schedule and him producing dangerous results. All these without any indication that he sought approval from upper management. Why would you use the word "complaining" when communicating an issue? State the facts and how they diverge from the formal process, flag parts of the process that are problematic due to lack of resources of consistency, put them in an email with a "default" course of action if not answered and without using "I" or "They", use passive voice (tone). Keep the score in writing as an informal calendar linked to the respective communications. Cc the manager. Obtain bliss, people will fret then they will forget.

If the team is disfunctional or the manager bad consider changing work. Not only due to the dysfunction but because a good team and manager is part of ones' mentoring, and it hampers ones' growth. At least now you gain some reflexes that will assist you in the future, if you chose to move on.

>He's the only person who knows how to release it. The other team didn't communicate until today that a release is necessary.

Also these deployment tasks are quite repetitive, it's a big strain, I can understand your pain. I have managed to automate myself out of this, at my current job: most deployment tasks involve the following steps: Commit the change, open a pull request, wait for the CI build to complete and download the build log, extract an image id from the CI build log, put it in some other repository and commit the change. It is possible to automate the first three steps with the github api (if your shop is using github), I have an example here: https://github.com/MoserMichael/githubapitools . The rest of it is easily scriptable.

Most of the time managers are trying to be helpful, and most of the time they do in fact understand quite a lot of the background of a project.

I'd suggest to try to see the situation from their perspective, which you maybe already did, but sometimes this helps understanding a perceived lack of action.

It’s not good if they’re paralyzed by this though. If the manager automatically says no to anything that may contain some element of risk, I will stop telling them.

I have seen this happen (and in a few cases the cause for this to happen as well). All code (or releases, for that matter) are not created equal. There are some teams which are working on something which is more critical to the business of the company, at that moment, and there are other teams which may be able to absorb some tasks to let the first team focus on what's needed. Not saying that this was the situation with the OP, but this usually falls in the "greater good" category. I have seen organizations where inter-team boundaries are fought over and defended vigorously and others where these are more fluid and accommodative. I am not sure that the firm boundary teams end up doing better work or be happier overall.

What you're doing wrong, very honestly, is you suggest and 2 of your suggestions are losses (denying release).

Dont suggest, make enemies: send emails to both teams saying now it must be like that, lay the plan, pose a meeting to go through the plan and get yelled at. Once you get yelled at by the complainypants because what you tell them to do is too hard, now you can go to your manager and explain him they complain for the sake of complaining. The tech lead will get a earful and either fight you to his grave or admit defeat and let you do your reform grumbling waiting for you to fail.

I do that in a giant bank that cannot move without 10 approvers to everything, and the more these helpless teams fight me the more management put me in their midst to reform them ... and Im just a silly dev nobody and I can tell you the wonders one can do by just bulldozing. There are things to do if you fail eventually, which is to teach the higher ups to enjoy trying and failing, but that requires a bit of weaseling charisma :D

It's a fun game to play, until you realize it's not your job to manage the managers and your co-workers, and that you're underpaid for having that extra headache :)

From my experience you need to play a small political game, no way around it, what you want to do costs money and presents risk. If you believe it is necessary you need to find supporters in the management floor. Convince someone who can actually give you backup and help you get this done. If you can't find anyone like that, then either work on the project underground (risky, more work and less credit for you) or let it go (or leave).

This kind of thing needs to have some exec sponsorship or at the very least awareness. Otherwise ICs just risk landing on the sword.

You can try but once there’s resistance is probably a better idea to find something else. Let management figure out why people keep quitting.

I don’t like giving this recommendation out but the other way can make for a career limiting move.

> We've done two other releases in the past month and both required a day of troubleshooting to fix issues.

I feel you, it's especially frustrating when your product has such fragile and bespoke testing that things break on a regular basis. Then, us devs have to spend valuable time just troubleshooting.

Maybe I misunderstand, but if a product breaks regularly under "fragile and bespoke" testing, won't it break just as often, and probably more often, under robust and comprehensive testing? And if the product fails tests, who better to "just" troubleshoot the problems than the developers? (Perhaps you mean things break after nominal testing and subsequent release, but that's just shifting the time when the issues are detected -- the product still has the issues either way. And if the issues will adversely and/or significantly affect the customer, I imagine one's employer would prefer that you set aside your non-troubleshooting valuable time and fix the issues.)

I think the difference here is that with robust and comprehensive testing, it's immediately obvious when and where things break. Compared to a codebase with no testing, or fragile testing, where things break and you not only have to spend time fixing something, you also have to spend time finding what is even broken in the first place. That's where the frustration is, at least for me.

> The tech lead started out by complaining about how he has to do an untested unplanned release today because another team made some urgent changes.

They broke it they have to fix it. You need the light shining on that team, not strive to fix it yourself.

Sounds like they might not even know they broke it

>fight for what's right when others appear to moan and carry on

This is called being a toxic employee, I've come to think of that as a good thing but it's definitely not a career move.

Good story though, can definitely relate

It may be, based on my experience as that tech lead who declines everything, that the tech lead has already thought of all this many times over many years, has tried to implement the required changes, yet gets blocked by higher ups. And it may even be that those higher ups sometimes know it too, and deny him based on their higher ups.

A lot of times learned helplessness is true helplessness with learned resignation.

Oh man this is a punch below the belt, perfectly describes some of my previous gigs. I'm so grateful my current team is NOT like this.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com