u/lordlors

For context, there are only 6 of us in the whole department. 3 full stack devs including myself and our team lead, one front end engineer, manager, and then dept head. The manager has barely any knowledge in coding but our dept head is an engineer and knows coding. The company is about a hundred I think, so fairly mid-sized.

Firstly, I've never heard the word PR used in my work. I know it means pull request, but our dept head just gives us complete access to the repo to make commits. So we push commits however we want, whenever we want.

Code review is not always done. My team lead reviews code by not looking at the code together and having the coder explain, but just telling her I've done this and that, please review, and then she just replies it's okay when she's finished. Only if she notices something not good, she calls and points it out and suggests things.

Tests are done manually. We use Laravel but there is absolutely no use of PHP Unit nor Pest. My coworker and team lead tried to learn them before, but they were never actually used in development. So we manually test things on the browser, and write Excel documents for test cases, and take screenshots of every result from a test case. Tiring and painful.

There is no designer in our team. So before, for making mock up UI, it was either through code or Paint. Yes Paint. I introduced Figma and learned it myself. I tried to make Figma a part of our process during UI design and prototyping. There was a time my coworker used it with me, but in the end, I'm the only one left still using it. Our front end engineer used to use Photoshop for his UI design. But now they all use AI a lot in many things.

Nobody in the dept regularly attends seminars, events, etc. technology-related. When Laravel Live Japan occurred, only I alone wanted to go.

Since we use Laravel, attending Laravel Live Japan, I just recently learned of PHP Stan/Larastan, Rector, and Laravel Pint so I started using these tools. Because when I joined the company, nobody told me of these tools as they were never used. I had to learn it from Laravel Live Japan.

I advocated use of collections when appropriate/useful but my coworker was heavily worried about performance due to the past Laravel 5's terrible performance when using collections. We now use Laravel 11. She tested collections herself and found out unless there's a huge amount of data, collections don't slow things down. But looking at her recent commits, zero use of Laravel collections, and only just arrays and foreach loops everywhere.

There are barely any meetings (which is good for me I'd say) but because of barely any communication at all, there's not much sharing of information. Code ownership is very individual not shared, where I have no idea what my coworker wrote or did without asking her. There's one meeting per week but it's just a report of what you've done for the week.

I just wondered if these are things that are pretty common.