Yeah I'm actually doing my builds in Python instead of Ubuntu base since it has a much more recent version of aws-cli installed.

I need to learn python anyway.

How do you guys deal with a team member that just never really send to grasp things completely?

For example we'll have multiple conversations as a team, and this guy will immediately forget all the details and start conflating with completely separate projects. He's perpetually lost.

At this point the information has been communicated in multiple team conversations and one on one conversations. Both with and without whiteboard diagrams.

I'm not sure what else to try other than super verbose written documentation?

I'm inclined to talk to my boss about it, but I want to be able to frame it better than "I think this guy is just a dumbass." Maybe something like, "I feel like x is having a difficult time understanding the project, how do you think I can help him get up to speed?"

Lol i have a guy like that and i just shun him and give him as low impact tasks as possible

And if your boss doesnt know hes an idiot. But if he doesnt know you should tell him. If you think he does know, then idk what telling him would do, you’re stuck with this guy

My boss definitely knows something is up but what I've seen him ask about is the guy's level of engagement because he's missed a few days and been caught not paying attention a few times.

I think it's a big step from that to then say I don't think the guy is capable even if he fully commits himself.

Anyone have opinions or experience with graphQL? Our org (mostly front-end people) really want it. We've been trying to do it kinda of crappily so far and I was just put on the project to fix all the things wrong with our implementation. It makes sense from a client perspective but my initial thoughts are that it gets very messy when you have a spagetti microservices architecture. It seems much easier to layer GraphQL on top of a postgres backed app.

Why do you feel the latter 2 sentences?

We use it and are implementing it basically anywhere mobile or web talks to a service. We also use entirely nosql/apis and it seems to model fine. Complex relationship stuff is a sticking point, but that's pretty deep in our specific structure. Versioning kind of sucks because you basically just have to add fields, there isn't that /v1 /v2 style convention like there is in REST.

But overall, I really enjoy it, it vastly simplifies calling the service both for data and the fact that there is only 1 route, and no route implementation concerns implementing the service is nice as well.

Seems like a cultural fit issue. Dev isn’t engaged and doesn’t really like it there all that much FWIW. Trying just to get by. Doesn’t mean that they wouldn’t be productive somewhere else. What do you expect your manager to do about it if you discuss it with him?

Edit: Read your subsequent post. Your manager seemingly has recognized the problem.

Regarding the topic of employee engagement:
7 Fascinating Employee Engagement Trends in 2018

Quote:

3. More compassionate leadership.

People don’t quit their jobs, they quit their bosses. It turns out that the opposite is true too. An inspiring manager creates more team engagement. According to research by leadership development experts Dr. Brad Shuck and Maryanne Honeycutt-Elliott, “higher levels of engagement come from employees who work for a compassionate leader—one who is authentic, present, has a sense of dignity, holds others accountable, leads with integrity and shows empathy”.

Bold added and FWIW I think it is very accurate.

ya I do same as jmakin. try to steer the really easy work that way.

pairing with her to try to fix her code or implement a design is just brutal. I have to instruct her at the lowest level. like, ok, move the cursor to the end of the line and remove the last word, etc.

still, I can overcome that. what really kills me is that she is incapable of taking on any sort of outside communication to solve an issue. like, she has a story card that is implementing something for another team. say logging. well something is ambiguous or maybe an outright mistake. she comes to me and I confirm, yes that is likely an issue or yes you should get clarification. but then she just never emails the logging ppl to clear it up or if she does email them the communication is just so ambiguous and incomplete that it doesnt get resolved. then I need to step in and get everything figure out it.

this frustrates me bc when I work(ed) a story card or whatever I do everything I can to get this crap figured out without involving other ppl. its not the tech lead or tso job to figure out these granular implementation details. but I am forced to bc she is unable to properly convey the issue.

another thing that kills me is that she just hasnt progressed at all. I sat next to her and helped her with stuff almost a year ago. it wasnt too bad since she wasnt on my team. she joined my team about a month ago and I was thinking, well she has been learning for a long time now, she should be reasonably competent and able to take on some simple tasks. big nope.

so ya I have no recommendations.

Victor your situation seems like a hole in the hiring process. Someone like that should have never gotten hired in the first place.

Lol today was her 20th anniversary

Bad job not jockeying to keep her off your team. Someone doesn't like you.

so heres an example that just happened. she is working on a fairly straightforward card but it has taken nearly a week desite 3 different developers spending decent chunks of time helping her.

she sends me an email that says

and has 3 screenshots below it. one of the failure message, another of the messages for the tests that pass, and a third that has about half of the test file and the terminal with tests passing.

she doesnt give me her branch name. I am like ok, well I can look for her branch in tfs and check it out. but nope, she hasnt committed and pushed her changes to the server yet.

so like, wtf am I supposed to do with this?

There are people on my team who i know exactly what they will say in every circumstance. which is usually something like "strange" or "hmm, wasn't expecting that" or "that's odd" without ever being more inquisitive, offering a solution, asking a question... it's always the path of least resistance.

When asked if they are done with something it is always or "actually i was just about to start that now, i've been working on {insert bull**** excuse}"...

When they offer up code, it is always with the caveat of you letting them know if it doesn't work, which it doesn't like 99% of the time, and they are obviously hoping that you will just fix it yourself.

LOL OMG gluten that is my entire team

I got a lot better at dealing with it and dealing with bull**** though. It’s gotten way better as a consequence. If someone ever told me to let them know if something doesn’t work I would just ask “why wouldn’t you know that? “

I suffer from imposter syndrome occasionally, but then I hear stories like this and it goes away - keep them coming please.

I must have been extremely blessed to have hardly ever come across people like this in my workplaces thus far.

I have really bad imposter syndrome constantly until I spend a few days pair programming with a senior guy And have to walk them through every little tiny thing because they haven’t bothered to brush up on the documentation and constantly misunderstand the reqs

May or may not have spent the last few days doinf that and I am salty

Honestly this tells me 90% of what I need to know

Victor - maybe your shop should be worrying more about teaching basic software development fundamentals rather than implementing mega-extreme-agile, letting struggling devs rebase, and whatever a 4pm elevate is.



Also all that stuff is completely intentional. She's either not trying or has no idea what she's doing - but in 20 years has gotten really good at obfuscating things.

Beware she's probably also got a million passive-aggressive tricks if you go directly against her. As long as your boss is aware of the situation, and doesn't seem inclined to do his job and get her out of there, the best move is usually just to wait it out and try to pawn her off on someone else. There's probably a running joke that everyone gets a turn.

Unless there's something totally wrong with me, CSS and Chrome on android is just really erratic - really buggy.

Best cure for imposter syndrome is just start asking early and often about anything you don't know. When I get a junior dev who bugs the crap out of me with questions - I know they're almost always going to do well - unlike the devs who go off in a cave then come back with some half-baked crap that they should have been asking about.

Lol welcome to the terrordome. Choose your weapon: Samsung, Pixel, LG, apparently there's something called One Plus? Just kidding - you'll need to buy all of them as they all have their own weird quirks. Also you can't upgrade the OS until the carrier lets you. Every Android is a special snowflake combo of device, OS, and carrier-specific integration.

I'm sure it's better now but back in the day before every major project we'd look up the most popular phones and what OS they were mostly stuck on. Then we'd spend a lot of money on those. Upgrade one when the time came, but not upgrade another (which means the testers had to remember to say No every single time it popped up - no undoing).

We also had to support Chrome and Android native browser which Samsung insisted on never letting go of (does that POS still exist?). Both used the Chrome engine but Chrome was on like v39 while Samsung Galaxy with the latest upgrades was on v28. Fun fun bugs.

I literally had code that was like if (androidOS < 5.1 && browser !== 'Chrome' && manufacturer === 'HTC' && carrier === "AT&T"). But of course it wasn't that easy because each of those had to be derived from the cryptic user agent string. So much so there was some open source project to categorize all of the user agent strings and identify the devices, OS, browser, carrier, size, etc. The XML file it generated was like 20 GB. Here it is. I guess it's not open-source anymore: http://wurfl.****************/ Wtf why is so urceforge . net blocked?

I could always tell when we were close to actually finishing a project when some poor front end dev had an array of Androids scattered around his/her desk for a week and they're the last one out at night. Before that event I knew "almost done" was just talk.

It does seem to suck and I haven't got everything quite right yet even on my computer - chrome and firefox and my phone chrome - but the problem I guess I just hit some cache memory limit in the middle of a page load can wiping all my cache cleared that thing up.

You're giving me flashbacks. Several years ago when I had to deal with all this I used the Apache DeviceMap DDR (which provides similar raw data) to make my own user agent -> device lookup algorithm. That was a pretty interesting project, but it was for a now defunct startup. Which is good since that project is also defunct.

It's a brutal never-ending enterprise.

Doesn't help either that Android seems to deliberately obfuscate their UAs wrt to device and OS version, so you have no idea what's going on.

We had one C-level executive who kept wanting us to add windows phone to the mix (because he had a windows phone). We kept politely saying let's just wait until it gets traction. How many windows mobile OSes did we go through? 7? Literally all of them bombed. But man the hype - this is gonna be the one that sticks. Every damn time.