We’ve All Been the Newest Member of a Team
We all started somewhere. We’ve been that inexperienced developer, grinding their wheels in deep mud. Sure, you highlighted the need for help during what seemed like countless scrums. You’ve sat with a senior but shit didn’t sink in. Next thing you know, the sprint is over, and they need to move your precious 20 story point user story to the next iteration.
During sprint planning, someone (PM, lead developer, architect, customer lead, or other schmoe) thought this would be a good story for you. Maybe the other, better developers cherry-picked the easy stuff and your story was all that was left. The better developers are those that knock shit out and are all smiles Friday afternoons during corporate happy hours. You are drinking for another reason: to cope with impostor syndrome.
“I’ve never done that before… but I can try.”
You think you expressed just the right amount of concern about your user story during the sprint planning. But, your people pleasing nature and easy-going attitude are not doing you any favors when you report your status during the first scrums:
“I’ve been researching, and I think I have the right approach. Maybe someone could vet my ideas?”
The scrum master jotting some notes, “Okay, Vlad, can you meet with John to look over his code?” Vladimir is not listening but nods an approval. He’s very hard to pin down, always “do not disturb” in Slack, rarely in the office, and when he is around he’s shouting Russian into an iPhone.
Meeting with Vlad is bad news. You show him your research, consisting of some syntax highlighted blog post you found from a Google search. “No, no, just do this”, he says as he takes your laptop and quickly types some abstraction you’ve never seen before. You decide it’s best to write notes in a college ruled notebook, but your fast chicken scratch is barely legible when you review it later.
You tried, you grinded, you reached out and met with your senior, but the user story didn’t get finished.
What Happened?
It took me years of self-doubt and shame to understand that the horror of seeing my shitty little user story dragged and dropped from Sprint 25-B to Sprint 26 was not my fault. And believe me, this happened many more times during my early career. I got the unfair reputation of being unreliable. Ultimately I left the job that made me feel like I was in “a bad marriage”.
I moved on, I moved up. Suddenly I’m the jock developer juniors looked up to: overconfident, gleaming white teeth, and fancy tennis shoes flaunting corporate dress policy. “I’m just a developer” you giggle when a director-level suit catches you in the hallway. People pause to wonder how you remain upright with your massively inflated douchebag head.
But my problems haven’t changed. My juniors are dealing with the same issues I faced years before. I struggle with my choices: do I work on some code, or do I document the unwritten assumptions so that the newest developer has the visibility they need to succeed? I can finish their silly 20 point user story in about 2 hours of gorgeous, perfectly indented code. But should I?
It all boils down to ego: do I work on something sexy, something in my wheelhouse that I can be wildly successful with, or do I document the specifics so that some schmoe can do their work? This documentation is so unappealing, you beg your manager to hire a project manager or a business analyst or a product manager, anyone that will allow you to keep writing code, heads down, alone in a cubicle, with Avicii jamming in your Beats headphones.
You’re not a tech lead, John. You don’t remove roadblocks. Instead, you’re just another Vlad, with that elusive “do not disturb” status, completely unaware and blameless when a junior’s user story is dragged to the next sprint. They think it’s their fault. Maybe they’re working for another Vlad.