Oh yes dont even get me started on QA. Total waste of time. Devs should do that testing.

So say I, but good luck getting a dev to write their own tests. Usually they are too close to the implementation to properly write a test for it. It is better, most of the time, for someone else to do it, that is operating from a pure blackbox view. For stuff like small unit tests, I think the dev should write their own.

Job update:

I have successfully implemented a process with a full buyin from my team, they even all stand at the meetings now, which I didnt even ask them to do. Overall Participation is way up, everyone is more cohesive and engaged, even people that had been mostly checked out before. It is feeling much, much more like a team and less like a team of individuals doing their own projects. It has been much easier since problem child left and it has had a definite, noticeable improvement on morale.

There are other major challenges I'm dealing w/ right now but overall I am much more bullish on my view of this company and where it's headed, we're seeing revenue, and my overall stress is way lower, especially now that I'm solely responsible for management and don't touch code. I still look at code to understand what is going on or to review, and I occasionally test stuff (I function as QA a lot of the time because I am really anal and able to break things very easily) but I am not doing any development which is how it should be.

I think I will ride it out for the rest of the year if things keep going this way.

Nice Jmakin!

It's amazing what can happen when a bad hire leaves.

I'm in an interesting situation. Our team over the past 6 months have dwindled down to 3 engineers and one manager.

2 left to transferred teams.
1 is leaving for another company.

So we went from 6 engineers down to 3 in the span of 6 months. During these 6 months we have been trying to hire and have not been able to land any new hires. In the meantime other teams within the same organization are picking up new hires easily. I just started to be thrown in the interview loop the past month or so which I think should have happened earlier.

Our manager, who started less than 8 months ago now only has 3 engineers under him. It seems like everything that could go wrong, did go wrong... And to make it even worst, my teammate who I love working with just told me he just signed a new offer and will give his notice soon. So that means there will be only 2 engineers left!

To make matters even worst, I also have been interviewing and I'm currently waiting to hear back from two companies. I'm supposed to find out by end of next week. I hope to god that I land at least one, since I do not want to be on this team anymore. With my teammate leaving, this is going to be an awkward conversation if I end up leaving as well since that will leave only one engineer for my manager to manage.

So many different things lead up to this situation. My manager is not technically sound. The staff engineer has made some poor decisions that pissed everyone off. We keep bad hires around for too long which brings morale down, forcing good engineers to leave.

Back in my network/computer technician days I had to tell my boss I was quitting after his only other technician quit that morning. I was going to wait until the end of the day to give my news. ****er snaked me.

I had the most awkward painful car ride with him across SF after that. Just horrible. He was going on and on about how things would be ok after the other tech quit and I finally had to tell him I was leaving too. I could have just sat there and played along and then told him. But I tried to be a standup guy and was rewarded with a hellish car ride for it. The boss didn't speak to me my entire last 2 weeks.

I would love it if my boss wouldn’t speak to me for the last two weeks. He thinks I like him but I dread talking to him every time.

Tell these bosses to stop being babies. This is real life. They get paid to handle staffing. If they wanted to retain employees they would pay more. It's a pretty simple formula.

I don't mean writing system or integration tests although I def disagree that devs shouldn't or can't write those. QA doesn't do that rather we have test engineers who do that.

I mean manually testing a new feature and manually checking that it didn't break anything. It's my understanding that at most plac3s QA does manual testing. But imo, it should be on the devs.

Oh... devs should informally do that but it’s always good to have a second pair of hands on something. We automate everything where possible. I had a heavy hand in that process.

A big problem is our test coverage is horrible so whenever we land a big account inevitably there are issues that arent caught til we ship a release. It’s really frustrating because the product is basically beta but it’s marketed as a mature one. On top of that there seems to be a really anti-testing culture I am fighting. But it’s getting better, I think

Barrin, you work for a good company - have you considered just transferring teams?

This seems to be more and more common, particularly with microservices and quicker deploys. We have no QA, and I can deploy and rollback something if it breaks in prod.

They're making a push to get rid of our staging environments as well, which I'm not sure how I feel about

Yea I have. I think I will if nothing pans out next week.

ya I mean its awesome if you have QA to just look over your work. I hate hate hate manually testing. so I just write a bunch of code and ship it to QA and let them find the bugs then thats awesome for me. but its a really dumb way to run a company.

Why did you bother coming back for the second week?

I gave them 2 weeks notice. I worked 2 weeks. The other boss (his brother) talked to me.

I understand the gave your word thing, your manager being a dick probably wasn’t part of the negotiations and re-opens them. You don’t get extra points being the only professional in a work situation...

I don't like burning bridges. Everyone else was nice to me. And they needed me.

I missed a key word in this lol

I would like this post if such a thing existed when this software was written...

Fully agree about not burning bridges. I worked for a couple years collecting debt before going to college. Worst job ever. I still put in my full two weeks and thanked all the supervisors and managers for being so wonderful (puke) before leaving.

I wouldn't burn brides either! Yikes!

You are responsible for your own mental health, I don’t think voluntarily staying in a toxic situation because of some misplaced sense of professionalism is a good idea. How toxic the environment has to be before you just leave is always where the debate is going to be...

So I need some negotiation advice. I have two possible offers coming through next week from two big companies.

One company (company A) where I want to work at is notorious for low balling, is asking for my salary expectations even prior to passing hiring committee. I pushed back saying that I haven’t thought about it, which is a total lie. I have a range but I don’t want to anchor myself to something. I know that if the other company doesn’t go through, I wont have competing offer. The other company, if I do get an offer, is going to offer me a higher level at L4, whereas company A is going to offer me an L3 with a total that is lower than mine by like 10%. Recruiter for company A says he doesn’t know if I get L4 or L3 since that is basically based on the hiring committee’s decision.

I’m willing to walk away if I get only one offer and I’m getting lowballed. My current compensation is all cash, and I know that company A is going to offer lower base. Recruiter is pushing for a range by Monday. He said that he wants to know this so he can fight for me at the compensation committee which I think is total bull****.

I’m really worried that I only get one offer at which point I don’t think I be willing to leave. Company B’s L4 comp is going to be significantly higher than my current comp based on levels.fyi

Do not tell the recruiter ****. He is not your friend, he is not on your side. His goal is to ensure that the deal closes.

I think a good answer is "you are in a position to know what a person of my caliber is worth. If you offer me what I am worth, I will accept. If it's reasonably close I will counter offer. If you can't pay me what I am worth, I will not accept"

The hiring company and recruiter hold all the cards - they know what they're paying your co-workers and they generally speaking know what it should cost to hire people of varying levels. You do not need to help them out.