An associate developer foolishly joked about senior developers never being able to spend time actually coding. As a senior developer myself, I took offense to that and decided to waste the last 30 min of my day typing up my previous day.
- 09:00 - Sit down, log in to PC, sip of coffee, check emails
- 09:20 - Open up IDE, start working on PBI’s for current project
- 09:45 - Get random email from a different team saying a service I manage isn’t working in QA for them.
- 09:50 - Tell them nothing has been deployed to QA in weeks so its still the same. Issue must be on their end.
- 10:00 - They reply back and CC their boss saying they haven’t changed anything on their end so it must be my issue.
- 10:10 - My boss emails me asking about a support ticket that came in for a different service in production. Schedules an impromptu meeting to discuss.
- 10:35 - Meeting done, pulling QA logs for other team. No log entries for their requests. Strange.
- 10:45 - Pull up the project to run locally. Everything runs fine. Check repo to verify nothing new has been pushed to QA. All good there.
- 10:50 - Reply back to other team saying I see nothing wrong on my end. Ask them what specific error they get. Start looking into the other service production issue.
- 11:00 - Send email to user having production issue asking for more details. Out of office reply…
- 11:03 - Forward email to users coworkers. Everyone replies with unrelated and unhelpful info. Guess I’ll keep splunking.
- 11:30 - Team Standup
- 12:00 - Working lunch to make progress on my PBI’s.
- 13:10 - User replies saying their production issue magically stopped happening.
- 13:30 - PI planning meeting.
- 13:35 - Other team sends me a chat message asking if I’ve made any progress on their issue. Tell them a second time I need to see what specific error they are getting.
- 13:45 - They send me a screenshot of a generic error popup in their application.
- 14:00 - Meeting done, I reply to other team saying that error is on their app, not mine. And can they give me actual logs showing an error response from my service. No reply.
- 14:05 - Coffee break. Thinking about taking up smoking.
- 14:06 - I ignore a message from my BA asking what’s up with the QA issue for the other team.
- 14:30 - Another unrelated meeting.
- 14:50 - Other team schedules a meeting at 15:00 to discuss this QA issue. Says its keeping them from testing for an upcoming release.
- 15:00 - Leave other meeting early to join this new meeting.
- 15:05 - Have their QA tester share their screen to show me what they are doing on an app I have never seen or used.
- 15:10 - Have them use their browsers web dev tools to get the network call to my service. Everything on their site runs through an ASHX handler so i cant see the actual call to my service. Ask them to get one of their devs on.
- 15:20 - One of their devs joins, we go over the whole issue again with them.
- 15:25 - Says they hired a consultant to manage this old crap but he is out of office today. I ask if he can still access any logs
- 15:45 - Finds the logs. Overly verbose with nothing useful but I do see an error calling an old service we dont use anymore. I ask them to pull up their repo to see recent commits
- 16:00 - Shows commits from their consultant yesterday. We start to compare to last known working build.
- 16:20 - My BA sends me a ‘Bueller?’ message. I ignore.
- 16:30 - We find a web config entry that is using the old server name for my service that we changed months ago. Consultant must have messed up his repo somehow. We change it to correct URL.
- 16:45 - Once we verified the site was working again, i casually joke that I was right all along and none of this was my issue to resolve. Crickets.
- 16:46 - Screw this I’m done for today.
Surprisingly little time on calls.
I had 5 scheduled and 4 unscheduled meetings today. At the same time, I’m constantly messaged by a project lead, because “DEV is not working and we need to ship next week”. Turns out the “ultraprincipal supersenior dev” of our team (again) pushed completely untested and obviously broken commits and of course merged without any comment to any of us (again) and then decided to go on an extended vacation.
Sometimes I feel like “senior” means simply orchestrating idiots so the few smart people in my team can get anything done.
Oh, and we had a security incident in our network and our IT department decided to randomly deactivate accounts and revoke some certificates. Because that’s what you need in times of crises: denied access.
some places are like this. Where I work now seems to be like this. Tech lead starts working on something, breaking things, then he has 100 meetings and either gets distracted or has another emergency and leaves things broken. He doesn’t write tests, pushes images built locally without CI/CD pipelines and lately he keeps messing pubsub subscriptions. Data from other services stops coming through and people ask us why isn’t our service working. ugh
As a lead (though in a small project), I can’t even describe how frustrating this is. I’m very aware, that I don’t get things done on time. I’m trying to delegate tasks, but it also feels weird to delegate tasks that seem like pretty much my core role.
I’m extremely lucky, that I have a very good and pretty senior dev on my side who’s smart enough to see if things get delayed and simply does them himself.
Nonetheless, it feels like I’m barely doing any dev work. Yesterday I spent 4h on various phone calls and meetings, another 2h on writing the results down or writing mails and the rest of the time was this “15 min between meetings” crap where you can’t get anything done except a meeting with the toilet.