u/chloapsoap

I don’t know why I’m writing this. I think I’ve just had such a crazy week that getting this all down in writing will be cathartic. And maybe people have similar experiences. If not, consider this an ADHD programmer diary entry lol.

I’ve been at my company for over 5 years now. It was my first “career job” post-college so I had a lot to learn. It’s been a bumpy ride for me. Between learning new skills, maturing as a person, and taking care of medical issues, I’ve had a lot of ups and downs in my career here. At the beginning of the year I got a new manager who has really helped me develop my professional skills. Around the same time as he got hired, I started getting proper help for the medical issues that were untreated for a long time. In the past year I’ve gone from feeling useless to finally being able to contribute in the ways I’ve wanted to. This is not super relevant to this week, but it’s important context. I’ve fucked up a lot in the past, and I’ve been waiting for an opportunity to prove that I’m capable

On Friday, my SM messaged me asking me to help Team B with a user story. Basically act as a consultant while they completed their work. She said that this was very important and took precedent over all my current work, very strict deadline with lots of eyes on it. Cool. I reviewed the story and the implementation seemed simple enough. I messaged the developer I was consulting (Dev 1) and he set up a meeting for Monday. Wonderful.

Monday rolls around. I realize that Team B has not actually written any code yet. Dev 1 is expecting me to walk him through the process of making his code updates. Annoying, but okay. It needs done. We work together for the rest of the day. Make good progress and hit a small snag. Decide to reconvene tomorrow. Throughout the day, I realize their code is a little funky. Weirdly formatted, a bit old. Smells bad. Whatever, that’s their business. I can work with funky code. We’ll figure it all out tomorrow.

Tomorrow comes, Tuesday. We try some things. I realize we are totally fucked. Team B using module versions that we haven’t supported for years. Their prod and non-prod environments or horrifically out of sync with each other. This is a critical piece of infrastructure that is central to our entire organization. And Dev 1 who I’m “consulting” has no idea how any of this works. I’m thinking we need to do a complete overhaul to their code to get this working (the deadline is now end of week). I message another developer on my team who is intimately familiar with this code and is also the smartest woman I know (Dev 2). She agrees that we are fucked. It’s late so we log off for the night.

Wednesday morning. I hit the ground running. I’m coming up with a plan and doing tests. In standup, I start sounding alarm bells that shit is not okay. That I need help to at least come up with a plan given our timeline. Dev 2 is officially assigned to help. She and I come up with a plan. We decide to just take Team B’s code and write it ourselves, both exploring different approaches to meet the deadline. Team B is slowing us down and they aren’t doing any work outside of pair programming sessions anyways.

That night my SM asks me wtf is going on. I spend an hour telling her what I’ve been dealing with this week. She says that execs are messaging her asking why our team (Team A) is holding everything up. I explain that Team A hasn’t made any changes to our code. We are exclusively helping Team B write their code. SM is pissed, but not at me. The next morning, SM FIGHTS FOR MY LIFE in their standup call. My manager messages me not to stress too much about this (too late lol). By Thursday morning EVERYONE understands that Dev 2 and I are busting our asses to make this thing happen.

Thursday, my SAVIOR Dev 2 shows up with a beautiful beautiful (hideous) hack job that gets where we need to be. I have the permanent fix ready, but we table it until our MVP is done. We spend all day deploying non-prod together and ironing out the kinks, but the momentum is there now. I post an update to our big important chat that we’ve got a successful deployment, and it’s met with UPROARIOUS JOY. Most positive impression I think I’ve ever made in my 5 years. Maybe in any job I’ve ever had. I watch the standup recording where SM stood up for me. Just to decompress a little🍿 then we worked into Thursday evening prepping prod.

Now it’s Friday. Today. We spend the morning handing the code off to Team B. We still need to be there tomorrow night because these fuckers can’t be trusted alone, but I can finally breathe. Leadership is now praising me and Dev 2 up and down. We chum it up over how tired we are.

That’s my story. It doesn’t really have a message other than it was a thing I needed to get off my chest. My brain is mush at this point, but I feel like I’m getting actual recognition for the first time in my career. At the same time, I’m still struggling to accept it. If it weren’t for Dev 2 this would have been doomed. But it seems like she feels mutual about it.

Anyone else been in this situation? This is so new for me. I just wanted to get it off my chest. Thanks for reading

I’m in the middle of running my pipeline during our last release. Suddenly one of our senior/lead developers starts asking all sorts of questions about why I’m implementing this this way, and accusing me of “acting like ChatGPT” and not paying attention to what I’m doing.

The issue is that this wasn’t what happened at all. I had good reason for implementing this feature the way that I did. There was a conversation in the discussion of my card regarding the same question that this dev had. It had been answered, so I didn’t feel the need to reconfirm this.

Also, in our pre-release call, another colleague asked me the same question, why I was doing it this way rather than that way. I explained it to him as I understood it, and he also found this explanation reasonable. No further questions were asked leading up to the release.

I was sort of stunned in silence when this happened. I didn’t want to argue or come across as defensive. I just wanted to focus on getting it right while our release call was happening and deal with my feelings later. I confirmed with the relevant team that this alternative implementation was okay, then I made the change accordingly. It was all fine. But over the weekend I’ve been thinking more about what happened and it’s made me feel very angry and shameful.

My main issue is that this distinction was so minor. Either implementation would have worked, and none of it had any critical impacts. My implementation had more separation of duties in exchange for more short-term maintenance. The other implementation was the opposite. That’s it. Had I been making some critical change incorrectly, or had I actually not done my due diligence, I would be more understanding. But this whole situation has made me very frustrated. We have appropriate ways to address disagreements like this. Making an example out of me in the middle of a release isn’t one of them

Now the whole team heard this experienced and reliable dev basically say that I’m bad at my job. They didn’t get to hear my explanation because I was focused on making things right in the release window. I’m wondering how many of them walked away doubting my capabilities because of this.

I’m planning on talking to my manager about this later this week, but right now I’m just feeling really unmotivated because of this. I don’t want to be looked down upon as lazy for making a reasonable assessment and then having someone above me blow it out of proportion. It sucks

I have a headcanon that a nation’s dominant hand corresponds to which side of the road people drive on. Countries that drive on the right side of the road are right-handed and countries that drive on the left are left-handed.

My reasoning behind this is that, for cars designed to drive on the right, your console, stick shift, and radio are all accessible with your right hand. This is a more favorable configuration for right-handed people irl. The converse also applies for left-driving cars.

So countries like UK, Ireland, India, Australia, Pakistan, Japan, New Zealand, and a few others are left-handed. All other countries are right-handed.

This also fits nicely with the general demographics of left-handedness. About 10% of the population is left-handed, and a similar amount of countries are left-handed with this headcanon.

I’m left-handed myself so this is something I think about a lot. I have a lot of weird headcanons but this is one of my favorites because of how realistic it is.

So I guess…discuss???