#EngineeringEthics #WorkplaceBehaviour #TeamCollaboration
Hey everyone! 👋 Have you ever had to deal with a situation where a senior engineer at your workplace insists on enforcing practices that they themselves don’t follow? I’m currently facing this dilemma and could use some advice!
Here’s the situation: There’s a repository at our company for API contracts, and one senior engineer demands strict adherence to it, even though he doesn’t follow the same procedures himself. It’s causing some confusion and potential inconsistencies, especially as he’s now making changes to existing APIs.
I’m looking for guidance on how to address this issue and ensure that everyone is on the same page when it comes to procedures. Here are a few possible solutions I’m considering:
– Have a team meeting to discuss and align on the procedures
– Implement a peer review process to ensure compliance
– Address the situation with the senior engineer directly but respectfully
What do you think would be the best approach to handle this kind of behavior in a professional manner? Share your thoughts and experiences! 🤔 #TeamUnity #ProfessionalDevelopment
Maybe worth making an API linter and write a guide on how to do things?
That’s what I did at Google for our APIs. Lots of opinions there so we had to pick something and enforce it.
Check out aip.dev/aep.dev for some inspiration.
The best way would be to mind your own business and just go with the flow, if it starts to blow back on you then you know what to do
He’s presumably responsible for what goes into the repo and will be held accountable for anything negative happens. That likely doesn’t apply to you in the same degree. The more senior your position is the more privy you are to all kinds of info and updates coming, along with deeper knowledge in general from more experience. There could be some merit to his decisions for seemingly rushing his own code out. If your employer’s upper level positions have their shit together they certainly have higher expectations for project completion and tighter deadlines for him than you. Sometimes you have to cut corners where you know you can just to get stuff out the door. I think Picasso’s quote “Learn the rules like a pro, so you can break them like an artist” could be applicable to this kind of situation.
You said it’s not causing issues and he does that to everyone, so it doesn’t sound like he’s singling you out. As frustrating as it might feel, I wouldn’t make a big deal out right now unless it starts causing issues.
What happens if you don’t follow this his guidelines?
Start by polishing up your resume and walk away from this shit show.
He is asking for a bitch slap
PRs shouldn’t be merged without a review. Is he bypassing this? If so, get that locked down, by addressing the problem in general (devs shouldn’t be allowed) rather than targeting him in particular. If not, then who’s reviewing his crap? They should be rejecting it. If not, then I’d bring that up in retros – again, in general as much as possible (reviews are letting things get through) than targeting anyone in particular.
And if he still manages to get away with it (which I’ve seen before), then it’s just something you either live with or go elsewhere. But when I’ve seen it, it’s been very visible to everyone that he got special treatment. It was a “cost of doing business” kind of problem, like a buggy dependency or something. Yeah, we hated it, but no one ever got in trouble for his crap. His initials (which he’d mark his comments with) eventually got turned into a verb to indicate you had to deal with fallout from his crap. “Oh, you got ABC’d, huh?”
Do as I say, not as I do.