Programming @programming.dev Zardoz @lemmy.world 10 mo. ago

Day in the Life: Senior Dev Edition

An associate developer foolishly joked about senior developers never being able to spend time actually coding. As a senior developer myself, I took offense to that and decided to waste the last 30 min of my day typing up my previous day.

09:00 - Sit down, log in to PC, sip of coffee, check emails
09:20 - Open up IDE, start working on PBI's for current project
09:45 - Get random email from a different team saying a service I manage isn't working in QA for them.
09:50 - Tell them nothing has been deployed to QA in weeks so its still the same. Issue must be on their end.
10:00 - They reply back and CC their boss saying they haven't changed anything on their end so it must be my issue.
10:10 - My boss emails me asking about a support ticket that came in for a different service in production. Schedules an impromptu meeting to discuss.
10:35 - Meeting done, pulling QA logs for other team. No log entries for their requests. Strange.
10:45 - Pull up the project to run locally. Everything runs fine. Check repo to verify nothing new has been pushed to QA. All good there.
10:50 - Reply back to other team saying I see nothing wrong on my end. Ask them what specific error they get. Start looking into the other service production issue.
11:00 - Send email to user having production issue asking for more details. Out of office reply...
11:03 - Forward email to users coworkers. Everyone replies with unrelated and unhelpful info. Guess I'll keep splunking.
11:30 - Team Standup
12:00 - Working lunch to make progress on my PBI's.
13:10 - User replies saying their production issue magically stopped happening.
13:30 - PI planning meeting.
13:35 - Other team sends me a chat message asking if I've made any progress on their issue. Tell them a second time I need to see what specific error they are getting.
13:45 - They send me a screenshot of a generic error popup in their application.
14:00 - Meeting done, I reply to other team saying that error is on their app, not mine. And can they give me actual logs showing an error response from my service. No reply.
14:05 - Coffee break. Thinking about taking up smoking.
14:06 - I ignore a message from my BA asking what's up with the QA issue for the other team.
14:30 - Another unrelated meeting.
14:50 - Other team schedules a meeting at 15:00 to discuss this QA issue. Says its keeping them from testing for an upcoming release.
15:00 - Leave other meeting early to join this new meeting.
15:05 - Have their QA tester share their screen to show me what they are doing on an app I have never seen or used.
15:10 - Have them use their browsers web dev tools to get the network call to my service. Everything on their site runs through an ASHX handler so i cant see the actual call to my service. Ask them to get one of their devs on.
15:20 - One of their devs joins, we go over the whole issue again with them.
15:25 - Says they hired a consultant to manage this old crap but he is out of office today. I ask if he can still access any logs
15:45 - Finds the logs. Overly verbose with nothing useful but I do see an error calling an old service we dont use anymore. I ask them to pull up their repo to see recent commits
16:00 - Shows commits from their consultant yesterday. We start to compare to last known working build.
16:20 - My BA sends me a 'Bueller?' message. I ignore.
16:30 - We find a web config entry that is using the old server name for my service that we changed months ago. Consultant must have messed up his repo somehow. We change it to correct URL.
16:45 - Once we verified the site was working again, i casually joke that I was right all along and none of this was my issue to resolve. Crickets.
16:46 - Screw this I'm done for today.

30 comments

Ugh uncomfortably relatable. I always go in with good intentions to solve a tough problem or just clearing a task. Without fail after the first hour it becomes one of those days - every day. Then we can schedule another meeting to explain why the kanban board hasn't moved in 3 days.
Painfully relatable; add in junior devs pinging for quick pair sessions to help with their sprint items between all the meetings and that's my day! lol
- Permanently Deleted
  
  Oh, I’m not complaining! I love helping my junior engineers… It does take time out of the day though, so I thought it would be worth mentioning!
Working lunch...

Never again
- Always! Then leave an hour early
  
  I have taken up the habit of being at work one-two hours before anyone else.
  
  I get undisturbed, effective work done, and I leave earlier. More work done, more own time with family each day.
  
  I'm still reachable through phone, add can fix most catastrophic problems from home, but that is so seldom occuring that it is OK, and collegues don't complain about me not being in office after 15:00.
  
  This is the way
Surprisingly little time on calls.

I had 5 scheduled and 4 unscheduled meetings today. At the same time, I'm constantly messaged by a project lead, because "DEV is not working and we need to ship next week". Turns out the "ultraprincipal supersenior dev" of our team (again) pushed completely untested and obviously broken commits and of course merged without any comment to any of us (again) and then decided to go on an extended vacation.

Sometimes I feel like "senior" means simply orchestrating idiots so the few smart people in my team can get anything done.

Oh, and we had a security incident in our network and our IT department decided to randomly deactivate accounts and revoke some certificates. Because that's what you need in times of crises: denied access.
- some places are like this. Where I work now seems to be like this. Tech lead starts working on something, breaking things, then he has 100 meetings and either gets distracted or has another emergency and leaves things broken. He doesn't write tests, pushes images built locally without CI/CD pipelines and lately he keeps messing pubsub subscriptions. Data from other services stops coming through and people ask us why isn't our service working. ugh
  
  As a lead (though in a small project), I can't even describe how frustrating this is. I'm very aware, that I don't get things done on time. I'm trying to delegate tasks, but it also feels weird to delegate tasks that seem like pretty much my core role.
  
  I'm extremely lucky, that I have a very good and pretty senior dev on my side who's smart enough to see if things get delayed and simply does them himself.
  
  Nonetheless, it feels like I'm barely doing any dev work. Yesterday I spent 4h on various phone calls and meetings, another 2h on writing the results down or writing mails and the rest of the time was this "15 min between meetings" crap where you can't get anything done except a meeting with the toilet.
it's funny because this reads like something exaggerating for effect, but anyone in this kind of position knows that it's not.
"I'm in this post and I don't like it"
Aside from standup on planning day, I’ve had this exact day many times.
- Nowhere there he spent 15 minutes starting some real code just so the interested people interrupt, with an unscheduled meeting just to tell you that all of what they told you is wrong and you will have to redesign everything again.
  
  Oh, and the meeting will last for 3 hours, even though there are only 15 minutes of content. So many of those other people will reach you during that meeting. Also, it terminates in another 3 hours meeting (scheduled as a 30 minutes one) to schedule the work for that system.
Feeling this. When I first started I wondered why some of the senior devs worked an hour+ later on most days. Now I know - sometimes it's the only way to get anything done.
- Nah fuck that. Just let deadlines slide. If you constantly have to work overtime to get your shit done it’s an organizational problem not a you problem.
  
  I finally was able to push back against all the meetings and shit I was having to deal with by making it extremely clear that the schedule was going to slip badly otherwise
BA/Manager/Scrum Master has been on vacation for some time and it's eye opening how much the team vibe has changed.

We need his business domain expertise, but we could easily go without his constant anxiety and "how's the task going?"s. It will be done when I say it to you for fuck's sake.
Wow you actually get logs from the other devs? I get fucking screenshots of abbreviated stack traces. Often not even the relevant portion of the stack trace or log.
Your PI planning meeting only took half an hour???
- Always! Then leave an hour early
This gives me flashbacks to my time in Support. And reminds me of why I never want to go back.
I do very little coding, but it's because our workplace has an abundance of junior developers, not because I'm pressed for time. My work is essentially just turning emails into technical specifications that others can implement and tutoring juniors when there are problems. Few to no pointless meetings because I insist on using emails or tickets whenever possible.
I'm not proud of it at all, but in my case:

06:45 - Sit down, log in to PC, be sure teams status is set to invisible, sip of ~~coffee~~ tea

07:00 - Start doing useful stuff while it's quiet

09:00 - Set status to available

13:00 - Try to remain sane and professional

15:30 - Time to end this: leave "early", because life reasons

I'm getting tired of this.
Tbf if you immidiately drop all your work and start fixing other coworkers problems only if they "insist" the error belongs to you... Its kinda your own fault. "Innocent till proven guilty". Either they show meaningfull logs/screens or they could go fuck themselfes.
- this ain't a criminal court. It's ok to be helpful to a degree, especially if a bunch of people can't work because of that issue.
  
  Yes, YOU cant work (your tasks) because of this issue. If your task is to complete a project then you arent helping this project or the people in this priject in any way. If your task is to help anyone who has an issue then it is ofc ok to help them. But then you have no right to complain, because you are just doin your job.
  
  Dont understand me wrong, im not against helping others. But if you are jeopardizing your own work because of their mistakes, then you are doin something wrong. Afterall you commitet to a specific goal which is your responsibility to complete.
The break that I i get laughing over these mutts fixing their silly issues, and gives me perfect day to get out of Monday blues or Fridays

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