Episode 412: Work-life-team balance and getting code-sniped

Soft Skills Engineering

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions:

1. Dear Skillet HQ,

   How would you negotiate a difference in work-life balance between teams?

   I love my job and my immediate team. We’re a tech group within a larger non-tech business, and it’s a fun problem domain.

   Our immediate team has some hard-won work-life balance, in part because it would be hard to hire anyone for the role if that balance wasn’t part of the equation. However, I worry about how to communicate differences when anyone we work with - all the people we’re building software for! - have an unbalanced schedule, because, 👋that’s show-biz 👋

   I even understand why other people have their role set up that way and respect it, but I don’t want to give up my balance either.

   How can I best handle the relationship when that difference is there?

   Love the podcast and the skillet-slack! Thanks for the advice, empathy and good humor.

   Tex Archana

2. Listener Frustrated asks,

   My work keeps getting stolen in the name of code quality!

   I’m a new backend developer for a team at a large company. I’ve been with this team for almost 3 months now, and the company for over a year. We’re developing an application to replace a legacy system, and the current feature has fairly well described user requirements. The front end developers keep finding new implementation issues that require more backend development, so new tasks get added during the sprint. The longest tenure developer (LTD) on the team keeps finding better ways to implement these backend changes, but these ‘better’ ways sometimes don’t meet the newly discovered frontend needs, leading to longer development times. Additionally, the longest tenure developer often takes over the implementation work from me, which is frustrating! The longest tenure developer also sometimes becomes too busy to deliver everything in a timely manner!!

   Additionally, the state of software development maturity is very low, so I’m trying to advocate for more technical process improvements like CICD and using version control more than once per sprint! I am frustrated and finding it hard to keep up motivation when everything is such a mess, and the other devs defer to the longest tenure dev who pushes back on many of these things.

   My code quality is fine, but I haven’t yet learned enough about our application to be able to identify these larger, cleaner approaches. Every code review so far has had no issues with my code quality, but inspires the longest tenure dev to implement a simpler solution, and they often will take my tickets and repurpose them for the new work! I’m worried that if anyone looks at productivity metrics they’ll not look good for me, and it’s hard to say what I’ve accomplished so far.

   Is my frustration valid? Should I quit my job?