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In a thread about dysfunctional and mismanaged projects, you describe a very dysfunctional and mismanaged project in a way that brings out the hilarity, frustrations, contradictions, and impossibilities of the situation. Good job! And then the majority of the replies completely miss the entire point and ask some variation of why didn’t you just superhero up and solo run the project? Providing extra entertainment by unintentionally highlighting exactly the manager galaxy brain that leads to such incompetently run projects. I love it!

What prevented you from helping him?

edit: This comes off as a rhetorical question. I'm really just interested what happened here. The project was assigned to both of you. I imagine that implies some responsibility for the whole of the project. You spent your "free" time learning React. Was there an organisational blocker that prevented you from helping him out, in any capacity?

That his expertise (and desired field) is a totally different layer?

Their expertise was not in React either, yet somehow it didn’t prevent them from using it on this project. Turns out in this field we can learn quickly and don’t have to be razor sharp focused in what we are able to do.

A somewhat charitable explanation could be some internal politics which in large organizations are always baffling to me.

>Their expertise was not in React either, yet somehow it didn’t prevent them from using it on this project.

Yes, because React is still front-end. He expanded his front-end skills with a new front-end skill.

Sounds like job functon, role, and area of experise don't matter, and everybody should do anything in your mind ("they're programmers, so whether they do front-end, server side, or program embedded software for artificial hearts, they should just jump to it and like it too").

>Turns out in this field we can learn quickly and don’t have to be razor sharp focused in what we are able to do.

Turns out people have specific preferences for the areas they like to work at, and have specific job functions they were hired for (say, "front-end engineer" or "data scientist") and whether they can learn another kind of role is moot.

They might if they want to, or if they have to because they need the money. But it's a totally disfunctional organization one that has them do something they weren't hired too, just because "it's all programming, surely you can learn it".

If you hire a systems programmer you shouldn't expect them to do UI or data science, just because your company didn't bother to have someone else for that. If you do have that need, ask for a "fullstack" engineer, or be upfront that you want people to wear many hats.

Programmers are not just "do whatever/replacable cogs" they have specific preferences, skills and expertise, and career goals. Actually that's true for any profession, not just programmers.

Well, in extraordinary circumstances it may be warranted… Help out a colleague, then both leave ASAP on good terms after victorious delivery.

> Turns out in this field we can learn quickly and don’t have to be razor sharp focused in what we are able to do.

Turns out this is how many orgs end up with mountains of half-baked copy/paste that sorta works-because-it-didn't-break-yesterday, written by people that have jumped ship to the next shiny-tech-of-the-month company and never have to suffer the consequences of their "quickly-learned non-razor-sharp-focused" actions.

> ... a Dilbert-level hapless manager was assigning me and a coworker to a fullstack project.

Oh so it was actually halfstack project.

It was a fullstack project with someone doing the front-end and someone doing the backend.

It wasn't a project given to two "fullstack engineers" which is a different thing than a "fullstack project" (which just means project involving all stack layers).

So the sarcasm falls flat.

Oh a half-half-stack project. My bad.

There's always Reddit for such stimulating intellectual discourse

Hardly qualifies as discourse.

My point precisely

What prevented you from helping him?

Guy already said, manager wouldn't assign other work.

I have worked in similar. Some workplaces are highly political.

In one case I was on contract, 3 months ahead, suggested to help in other areas, and even offered to "pause billing" and take personal time off. Yes, the contract allowed for it.

Nope. Needed me there every day, doing nothing. Otherwise, upper management would know the project was slipping?!

Some workplaces are highly broken.

The backend was in Go, a language that I have no idea about. Also this was in Japan and backend discussions and 3rd party vendors all happened in Japanese, which I also didn't speak. I suggested learning Go myself and try to help, but my manager was also against it.

I was dubious I'd be of much help when I suggested but at least I'd learn the language we were using and might be able to help long-term. But as things kept getting delayed I'm sure I'd have been able to learn enough to be of help even within that project. But again, had a hard ban to either join a different project or learn/help with Go, "just keep improving the front-end and integrate it with the backend and don't do anything else until that's done".

Thanks for the additional context. In your initial post it came across like you sat and watched the project burn.

Sorry for my bad explanation/coming off as that, since it's definitely the opposite. I actually left the company because of the stress of wanting to help and not being able to help. Going everyday seeing how the project was going into the ground and being told I couldn't help and to just sit there destroyed my soul.

Your manager sounds like a complete tool. Go is easier to learn than React IMO.

Japanese not so much, but it sounds like you could have at least helped with the implementation without speaking it.

Working with Japanese engineers without either speaking Japanese or being sufficiently acultured to Japanese cultural norms was an interesting experience for me.

Brilliant fellows, with a very different way of thinking about issues. Often however the solution was dictated by things outside of the engineering problem at hand.

No interest in learning backend dev stuff?

Why should they be? If they were a doctor, would you ask them "no interest in learning x-rays" in a similar situation, if they were doing anesthesiology?

But what we do is not the same as medicine, which is highly regulated and has implications for life and death. Nothing stops us from learning any new technical thing we care to.

>But what we do is not the same as medicine

Doesn't mean it's "whatever need there is and whatever I ask you to do, and forget the role you applied for, to and was hired to do".

>Nothing stops us from learning any new technical thing we care to.

Nothing should stop us from focusing on the kind of programming layer/expertise we want to do, either, be it systems, backend, front-end, data science,

If people WANT to change layer/role, they can do it themselves. And hopefully at a better company, where they can focus on their desired role, and aren't asked to also write front-end code when they were hired as systems engineers, or perhaps mop the floor because "you surely can learn that too, it's not like moping the floor is like medicine".

I'm not the cleaner in my office but I still take my cup to the dishwasher and put my litter in the bin when I leave. I'm not sure what I'd have done in the OPs situation but it wouldn't have been going round and round in circles slowly improving my own work in isolation.

My thoughts:

> But what we do is not the same as medicine

It is extraordinarily similar from a systems aspect

> which is highly regulated

Some areas of software development are highly regulated, and this is an environmental constraint instead of a work methods outcome

> has implications for life and death.

Much of software has implications for life and death, especially at firmware level or medical device & AI/ML. If your experience is only with FAANG or web front ends, then sure, this statement has teeth. But software automates processes, and a lot of processes can end in death, either by intent (military) or accident (health, law enforcement, manufacturing)

Yes. "Our patients are dying left and right, I was able to pick up a new field of anesthesiology, I could've picked up doing x-rays" => "why didn't you?"

Totally understandable if he says "because I don't like backend", but if you're essentially doing busy work just to keep yourself from going insane while someone else is struggling managing their work, you might as well help them. You'll learn something new, they'll struggle less, and the project will be better off.

And the company would get away with using people as they like, and under-stuffing roles because "everybody free can do anything else we lack"...

Maybe, but it's not like they'll learn from a project failing and a developer leaving on bad terms that they should staff projects appropriately. They'll shrug and go on while some guy suffered for months and another guy was bored out of his mind.

He could've learnt to mock the endpoints from the backend.

I literally said I mocked up the endpoints from the backend? To which my manager was angry?

Sorry. I wasn't able to see that on your comment.

Because there was a clear mismatch in available dev time vs what was needed, in the front-end vs backend err... teams. Thus asking the question.

As per the answer, although interest was there the situation itself didn't allow it.

I knew some backend dev stuff (Node.js) and am very much interested. This was Go, and while I wasn't particularly interested (I'd prefer to continue with Node) I would compromise and learn Go to help him and the project. I suggested it but again our manager was strongly against it.

Something I didn't mention which adds an extra of why I was unable to help, this was in Japan, and the backend-{everything} was performed in Japanese while I didn't speak the language, so talk about "not knowing the language" they were using.

For some people, it's not just about learning it's also about extra stress and worry that they might take on work they can't complete. I completely understand that.

I'm the type of person who will mostly say yes to anything, given some allowance on estimates and time.

>>> I was probably the only non-hostile one, even friendly, to him at work by that point

If you did not help him, this is highly subjective

Not to me. If they wanted to be a frontend dev, billed themselves as such and didn't want to take on backend duties, then they did their fair share by speccing the API and providing that. They have no direct obligation to work on the backend.

I did try to help him in any way I could, but didn't know the language he was using so I was not able to actually code for him. Couple of examples: I made a Node.js program to help him debug why a 3rd-party endpoint he had to call wasn't working, documented the endpoints he was doing (learned Swagger for that), and acted as intermediary between him and our manager to try to reduce the scope of the work or to at least ship in two parts.

It sounds fair to me that a developer hired to do front-end work does not want to do back-end. I can't blame him for setting boundaries, especially in a dysfunctional management workplace.

I've been in the back-end developer's situation and I still didn't think it is fair for others to re-specialize and help me in a large company. It's neither mine nor their fault the management is incompetent.

If this was a small company with a close-knit team covering for each other's blind spots, then it could be different. But what was described was at least a medium-sized company where in all likelihood the manager was paid a good amount of money to be competent at their job.

And instead the manager played games, saw the results of their actions, tried to slide the blame onto the person they made fail, and lost good engineers. The situation was completely in the manager's hands and so are the results. If we start expecting people to manage themselves under the managers, then what is the manager doing? Are they just a liability to the company with no upside? The role doesn't make sense then.