Returning and finding everything done is equally suspicious. That’s when you have to take a closer look and discover what spaghetti made it through peer review.
Or worse, it means you’re not as good as you thought you were.
It’s not so bad being the worst player on the team. Just means you have a lot of room for improvement as long as you’re willing to learn. Honestly it’s one of my favorite situations to find myself in. “Oh I suck. How can I get better?”
Sounds good unless you really suck and there is no way for you to improve. I might or might not be speaking from experience.
I’m having that same imposter syndrome feeling right now. But one of the SMEs at work today randomly complained to me about another agent and his lack of caring/learning and thanked me for how I am. So. Sometimes it works out well as long as you’ll listen and learn. You can always learn more it just takes time.
Also, all the automated tests were commented out.
Ive heard of stories where people would have an imposed test coverage percentage requirement… and they would just have a single dummy method that printed “.” to the console thousands of times. They then have a single test for that one method, and whenever their codebase grows to big, they add more lines to it so that the dummy method has enough lines to meet the test coverage requirement.
Fucking. The word is FUCKing. Fucking.
You can’t swear on the internet
I once had to go on a longer medical leave, couple of months. In preparation, I documented everything - pages upon pages answering all questions in easily searchable formats. For more than a month, any questions I got were answered with links to specific sections in the documentation, so people would know where to find everything. I put the links everywhere, in total there were at least 200 links to various sections of the documentation throughout all our communication mediums, as well as all information repositories.
After I came back from leave, most of the things I was responsible for were turned off. When I asked why, the response was “we didn’t find your documentation”.
I no longer care whether things keep working.
Sometimes I am happy about the increase in AI assisted coding specifically so junior devs won’t get as stuck without outside help. Very frustrating when they don’t reach out when they struggle, but at least they can privately copypaste into ChatGPT and get ideas. But, still requires a fine toothed comb when you’re doing the review to know if any toilet tier material sprayed out.
Generally when you go on holiday and do a detailed handover to another dev, you find the team spent the week fighting some crazy fire in prod or sudden shift in priorities from up the chain. Don’t think I’ve ever had them actually complete my work.
This is the result of so called tribal knowledge in software development. It’s even worse when the senior citizen who understands everything retires, goes senile, or dies.
Maybe, part of your job is to not touch anything in a random day and observe what happens when something breaks. That way, you can document what’s not being fixed so that your team is more prepared when you’re actually not there.
