This is an anonymous post sent in by a member who does not want their name disclosed. Please be thoughtful with your responses, as these are usually tough posts to write. Email sloan@dev.to if you'd like to leave an anonymous comment.
Hello everybody and thank you for giving me the space to post in this wonderful community of yours.
In case you do not want to read all of my rambling:
My current company relies more on delivery than on a job well done.
The team has never written a single test in the span of their existence,
and they never discuss code changes except if something critical is not working or taking too much time.I am worried that the current more experienced members will not change their ways and that I will not be employable if I keep on the same track and decide to change jobs.
I can only rely on myself to learn what the current industry asks for and would love to have a more technical team.
Have you ever been in the same situation? Am I panicking?
What would you suggest regarding my more experienced members?
I have been working for my current company for a while having started off in a junior software developer.
While working here, I notice that the software development relies more on delivery rather than quality over the long run.
A bit of backstory:
After I graduated from university, I started working in another company, which relied on best practices, clean code, katas and agile development.
I learned a lot from the team as they were very keen on keeping a clean code base.
Commits to any new feature or existing bug, were revised by the senior staff and rejected if something did not correspond to the standard.
It was a bigger project for a big client as well, so it was crucial to keep everything the best way possible. It was all to avoid revisiting unwanted changes. They taught me a lot about working as a team and had a really good time back then.
Since then, I had to move on and am working now in a company with the nicest people I have ever worked together.
I joined the team and learned all of the technology necessary for the project while working on it.
Mistakes are considered possibilities and they really encourage learning. Softskills such as interpersonal and leadership skills are taught throughout all the other teams.
The one thing that I see lacking is that the older software team members which have been working in the company for a longer time span seem to lack technical skills. As the managers are considered senior developers, the newer developers rely on what they say.
Delivery is the main priority as the customer is the most important and I think they do a good job there. We deliver but due to the poor code quality, we always create ourselves more work in the long run.
It is also difficult to work together on projects or legacy code, as it is never documented and as there are no regular meetings to show progress in the different projects.
After finishing projects no time is taken to improve the previous work nor revisited until some errors happen. We also never do code reviews, developer meetings, establish common practices nor decide on coding style.
I have tried to motivate the team to have a thought at it but it comes down to: "It does not add value" from the older members.
Older members seem to lack many skills and do not put time to learn new ways of doing things. I guess it is due to time and return of investment and that they did not invest the time before in it as it was not necessary for them.
Slowly I have begun to feel more and more worried about my career path while working here. I also worry for the company as it struggles finding more experienced people. The company always talks about using latest technology in the field and so on but the inner workings do not follow that motto.
I have also seen developers go from the company without being able to land any jobs and others outgrow their position by looking for more technical teams.
Have you ever been in the same situation? Am I panicking? What would you suggest regarding my more experienced members?
Thank you for having taken the time to read through this.
Top comments (1)
I think this happens more often than what you would think, if you want to prove the value of your proposals to the senior people, I would recommend you to begin setting a different direction, by adding tests, etc. but on personal/professional invested time, so that they have no excuses of you doing this on work, then after a while show how important that was.