Started dev job, not sure if I like it

dropstar

Hi there

I started a new development role this week but I'm not sure if I'm too keen on it. I'll start off by listing the positives about the role - it's in a really thriving area of development that I've never worked in before, and I'll likely get a lot of valuable experience out of it.
I got a nice salary bump taking the job, with a decent review system and bonuses down the line and there are some nice benefits like full health and dental cover. We're developing using really high-end hardware which is nice as my old job gave us 5 year old PCs that struggled to do anything.
The location is pretty good too as it's close to Dublin city centre and there's a bus which drops me a 5 min walk away from both my house and the office.

The negatives then are that the job isn't exactly as described - the team I'm on is only half the size I was told in the interview , and the workload is shaping up to sound really really intense, due to possibly naive and unrealistic targets so I'm worried I'm starting straight into a death march situation. I don't mind working a few late nights now and then, but I'm definitely not up for exhausting myself due to completely unrealistic project deadlines.

The second thing is that I think the other guy on my team, who I think is about 5 years younger than me, is either more senior than me, or is just really dictatorial - I'm not actually sure, as the ranks were never explained to me. He has more professional experience in the specific niche we're operating in, but I have more professional experience and qualifications overall, so I'd like to think that that counts for something.

The third thing is that the office is very cliquey - nobody has really made much of an effort to include me or get to know me, so I've been doing all the participating and starting conversations with people, but they kind of seem a bit indifferent or standoffish, not rude, but just not really interested. I guess this could be due to the all-male environment, probably not helped by the fact most developers are socially inept at the best of times anyway, but i'm finding the social aspect of the company much less friendly than was the case at my last role.

I'm trying to weigh up the pros and cons of the role so far. The material benefits of the job are pretty good, but the work environment and nature of the work itself are giving me pause. I'm only a week in so I'm probably being a bit too hasty in making up my mind about it, but my intuition is telling me I may not enjoy the job going forward.

Has anyone else any experience of this, or is this par for the course?

Cheers

srsly78

Do your hours, collect your pay. If it really sucks start looking for a new job.

And yes this is pretty much par for the course. Every company boasts about their top-notch dev team, but then you arrive there and things are quite different!

Just imagine if they told the truth: "Well most of our developers are on **** money and haven't a clue, we kinda muddle along burning through cash without a real plan at all!"

Oh yeah, the bigger the company the more bull**** is involved.

listermint

If you are looking, we are seeking staff in our place presently. Let me know of your speciality / background. Great working environment and a good team ethic.

philologos

dropstar: Your post is really interesting and some things rung home to me from it.

1) My team is quite small, and we have a lot of responsibility as well. For example, some work on the Oracle DB side, some work with Java on backend servers, and then myself and another guy work mainly with the .NET side and some SQL Server / Windows Server 2008 stuff, myself doing desktop application work, and the other doing mainly ASP.NET website stuff, but we hop around a bit as is needed. I don't know if smaller team sizes are becoming more and more common.

2) Unrealistic expectations generally arise in this field - First expectations as to when things are getting done rarely if ever end up being accurate. The question is how willing is your project manager to consider when things just aren't feasible. It isn't your fault if the deadline isn't reasonable, but it is your fault if you're slacking off (not you in particular, but you in general). Some people find it difficult to determine when one is the case, rather than the other.

3) As for dictatorial people, that's a part of the trade unfortunately. Programming is a job that is a lot about egos and boasting. It is a very competitive jobs as well, and that can produce the worst in people. Generally it happens by lines of seniority, I've seen it in quite a few people, but the line between a quiet confidence and an arrogance is something we need to be careful of in general as developers.

4) Offices being cliquey - Realistically, I don't talk to many people on a regular basis other than those on my team or those who sit near me on my floor. I've made more and more of an effort to get to know the others, but realistically that is the way things are for a lot of us.

I'm not sure if this is a specific thing. These are cons I can see in the company I work for. There are a lot of pros too. The question is when do the pros outweigh the cons and vice versa.

TrueDub

A week is too short a period of time to decide. Hang in there, see what it's like when you've been there a while, then decide.

luckyinlove

I started in a dev role a few months back. The salary & benefits were better than avg. I was very happy. Then I noticed that it seemed like the amount of your life/time you are willing to sacrifice for the company the better an empoyee you are. The quality of what is being produced is muck, management only seem interested in short terms wins & although most devs have ideas for how the process & quality could be improved, they just disappear in to a beurocratic void with little or no consideration. This means nothing improves & we are left burning the midnight oil trying to work with a terrible system that is makes change near impossible.

For example, I & many colleagues would have been in office on occasion from 9am until past midnight because of ambitious deadlines. People that leave the office between 5 - 6 are noticeably shunned.

What I find so frustrating is that so many people know how the process could be fixed long term but it's like the company don't want us to create ripples & just be available to take a call on a Saturday afternoon in case something falls to sh1t & your assistance is required.

U.S. Multinational. Is this accepable / common?, any suggestions for dealing with it?. Everything else apart from that is fantastic. However I might as well be running my own business because the culture of the place dictates that we should always be concerned with work. It makes home time difficult because although I don't bother checking mail when I'm home, it makes me feel like a terrible employee when I compare myself to others that rush home from work in the evenings to just open the laptops & continue working, committing code & sending mails well in to the am.

Is it wrong to have time away from work? Don't get me wrong I do switch off, but on occasion I will be called upon and I do obllige. However I resent their excessive demands considering so many of us know how to fix the problems that cause this, yet nothing changes.

srsly78

Become a contractor. Gotta spend a few years putting up with rubbish tho to get experience.

BrokenArrows

Ya im dealing with a project at the moment which was given to me with 7 days to do it in.

Rush job because customer wants it asap. Fair enough i said....

Then i find out that this project has been known to management for over 3 months and suddenly it needs to be done in a week. ****ing bollix, and its not like the customer hadn't already given the go ahead its just the fools never scheduled it.

I'm tempted to not have it done on time so that management get a bit of flack from the customer!!

Colonel Panic

**** rolls down hill, you think that the flack will stop with management?

dropstar

Well I've been here another week so the situation has improved slightly. The guy I'm working with already has a bit of a reputation for being a bit jumped up and bossy, and he's only 23 or 24 with two years professional experience. He's definitely good at his job, but that doesn't exempt a personal from normal professional etiquette. He is a total control freak and has essentially appointed himself as the lead for the project in the office; he wants to direct everything himself. I haven't really called him out on it yet as I'm unsure about his actual rank, and I'd be a bit of a fool if it DID turn out I was senior to him. I haven't managed to get a clear response from either our team lead or the recruiter who placed us all about what rank he is at compared to me, though the staff in the office reckon he's the same level as me. I did email the team lead asking what the story was, and saying he's kind of taking over and it's not much of a discussion. A lot of his statements begin with "I want you to.." or "We'll do X"

The problem is exacerbated by the fact that our team leads are in a different timezone so there are no actual managers onsite yet. A senior developer will be coming on board next month but for the next couple of weeks the place is essentially running on autopilot. I have never encountered this type of personality in my working career, it's quite fascinating on one level but painful to deal with on a day-to-day basis, especially when there's only the two of us in the team. For now I suppose I'll need to grin and bear it until I get a response from my manager and/or the senior developer comes on board.

ermahgerd

It sounds like the biggest problem is the management there, as opposed to the team or indeed the office.

If I were in your position though, I would stick it out for 6 months and then leave. Things are meant to start off rosy and then the goggles come off, the staff start being a bit more open and THEN you realise there's a lot of problems, not the other way around!

dropstar

ermahgerd wrote: »

It sounds like the biggest problem is the management there, as opposed to the team or indeed the office.

If I were in your position though, I would stick it out for 6 months and then leave. Things are meant to start off rosy and then the goggles come off, the staff start being a bit more open and THEN you realise there's a lot of problems, not the other way around!

Unfortunately it seems like you're right, and to be honest I don't think I could stick 6 months! I'm not sure what other options I have though given how bad it'd look if I jumped ship after a couple of months!

jimmycrackcorm

When he starts this "I Nedd you to do this" etc. Simply say that you'll need to clear it with a manager. If he disagrees then tell him that you've been told to await such clearance.

luckyinlove

What do you do when there is absolutely no training provided when you start in a job apart from a intranet wiki that is completely out of date. In my current role, I started and asked a colleague, what product are we working on. He didn't know. I asked could he describe the project and he said, but he said only the parts he's had the chance to work on he couldn't offer a high level picture of the project. I initially thought I had just asked the wrong person, but it turns out there the rest of the dev team are in the same boat. The top tiers of the company are pushing things on top of dev so fast, the priority is to just "get it done".

I am an experienced software engineer (5+ years), in this role a few months. There seems to be no time available to learn within working hours, so every time you are assigned a bug to fix you have to spend time trying to figure out where this fits in, how it's supposed to work, and then trawl through all the in-house frameworks trying to figure out how things have been implemented (no standard frameworks used). Everything is measured in hours, i.e. here's a bug, have the fix in for a build that is going out in a few hours. I brought it to my managers attention that I have a stack of bugs building up that I'm failing to fix because I simply do not know enough about the domain to tackle them efficiently. His response was that "few people do" & he recognizes it as a problem. But then conversation just goes no further.

Is this reasonable? It seems the only way to progress is to burn the candle at both ends as work hours comprises of "just getting it done" / "ticking the box" so it passes QA and facing interruptions with more and more things to do. Shortly after I started I felt under immense pressure to just stay at work in the evening (up until as late after 2am, back in at 8am). I have said to my manager on occasion "OK, I am currently working on (x), would you prefer I focused on (y) instead?", where both (x) & (y) are tasks assigned during the same work day. He usually says work on (y), but then doesn't seem to accept that (x) then won't get done with respect to it's original deadline.

There seems to be nothing but an accumulation of bugs building up because since the priority is to just "get it done", quality of code goes out the window, but QA are only interested in "does it work" according to spec. It then means that maintenance becomes a nightmare.

Is the problem with me or them? if it's with me, what do you suggest I do?

smcelhinney

dropstar wrote: »

Hi there

I started a new development role this week but I'm not sure if I'm too keen on it. I'll start off by listing the positives about the role - it's in a really thriving area of development that I've never worked in before, and I'll likely get a lot of valuable experience out of it.
I got a nice salary bump taking the job, with a decent review system and bonuses down the line and there are some nice benefits like full health and dental cover. We're developing using really high-end hardware which is nice as my old job gave us 5 year old PCs that struggled to do anything.
The location is pretty good too as it's close to Dublin city centre and there's a bus which drops me a 5 min walk away from both my house and the office.

The negatives then are that the job isn't exactly as described - the team I'm on is only half the size I was told in the interview , and the workload is shaping up to sound really really intense, due to possibly naive and unrealistic targets so I'm worried I'm starting straight into a death march situation. I don't mind working a few late nights now and then, but I'm definitely not up for exhausting myself due to completely unrealistic project deadlines.

The second thing is that I think the other guy on my team, who I think is about 5 years younger than me, is either more senior than me, or is just really dictatorial - I'm not actually sure, as the ranks were never explained to me. He has more professional experience in the specific niche we're operating in, but I have more professional experience and qualifications overall, so I'd like to think that that counts for something.

The third thing is that the office is very cliquey - nobody has really made much of an effort to include me or get to know me, so I've been doing all the participating and starting conversations with people, but they kind of seem a bit indifferent or standoffish, not rude, but just not really interested. I guess this could be due to the all-male environment, probably not helped by the fact most developers are socially inept at the best of times anyway, but i'm finding the social aspect of the company much less friendly than was the case at my last role.

I'm trying to weigh up the pros and cons of the role so far. The material benefits of the job are pretty good, but the work environment and nature of the work itself are giving me pause. I'm only a week in so I'm probably being a bit too hasty in making up my mind about it, but my intuition is telling me I may not enjoy the job going forward.

Has anyone else any experience of this, or is this par for the course?

Cheers

Dave, is that you? Shut up and do your work.

On a serious note though, its a tough one to call. There's every body telling you "you're lucky to have a job etc". They dont realise the mental stress that comes with being in a job you have no appetite for. Believe me, I've just left a job I was in for 6 years, where for the past year, I woke up most mornings thinking.. "oh sh!t, not this again.."

But you could end up making a rash decision and come to regret it. If you're as employable as you describe yourself, I would certainly try to eke out a place for myself in that team, shout loudest, make sure you're knowledgable on every aspect, and demand the respect you think you deserve, without being a pr!ck about it.

You may find that asserting yourself is the difference between liking and loathing this particular role..

druidhill

luckyinlove wrote: »

...
Is this reasonable?
...

No. Is this common? Yes.

luckyinlove wrote: »

...
but QA are only interested in "does it work" according to spec.
...

That's the role of QA.

I would say you need to contact the relevant manager again and re-state the position more firmly possibly try and sort out a few issues (or even a single issue) to show that it saves time moving forward. Basically, present a solution to the manager not a problem.