o_d [he/him]

Every engineering job I’ve left has been because of bad leadership.

The first, they hired a lead with no business being a lead. Not only was I much stronger from a technical perspective even though I had only been doing it professionally for about 3 years, but I was a better leader to the rest of the team as well. I had been sort of filling in in the interim before they were hired. They were let go not too long after I left.

The second, they hired an EM. I had been asked to work on setting up the code base for replatforming our web app and begin migrating pieces of it over. I was basically doing this on my own and working with timelines that I had given to leadership and providing weekly updates. This EM started micro-managing everything. This not only slowed my progress to a crawl, it was demotivating and stressful. They were let go not too long after I left.

My current position, I was moved to a new team during a company reorganization. The EM on this team is completely psychotic. Micro-managing to a degree that I’ve never seen before. They’re convinced that what we do Agile SCRUM, but we take in large projects each quarter, plan and scope them at the beginning, and then spend the rest of the quarter executing on them. When I or the team make suggestions that align better with agile, we’re gaslit and told our ideas “are waterfall not agile”.

We usually don’t take on projects that go longer than a quarter. The project that I’m on currently is bleeding into Q4. I warned about this from the very beginning, but the result was just more gaslighting, that I took too long on planning. I would have left, but the job market isn’t as friendly to hopping around as it was previously. Thankfully, I’ll be switching teams once this project is over.

Overall, all of these places had their problems beyond leadership. These are things that I can tolerate however, and with good leadership, can work towards improving. Once leadership turns to shit, it’s time to gtfo.

It can be rewarding. For me, this has a lot to do with team culture. Am I supported and given the time needed to make improvements as I go or am I constantly rushing to make a deadline?

The problem is that only 1 organization that I’ve worked for has actually tried to implement it correctly. The rest just say “yeah we do Agile SCRUM” but it becomes obvious quite quickly that no they do not. Just because we throw stories on a Jira board every 2 weeks and move them around does not make it SCRUM. I suspect this is partially the reason that some people have a negative view of it. They’ve only done “SCRUMfall” and assume that’s all it really is.

Oh yeah. I suppose this is very much a North America problem where most of us have a separate washer and dryer and are required to move from one to the other in between. A washer/condensing dryer would certainly fix this. Unfortunately, I rent so there’s no chance of me getting one.

Sounds like heaven. Do you find that you ever have to do any manual cleaning on top?

True. But on the other hand, at least when you forget about a load of dishes, you still have clean dishes. Forget about a load of laundry and you’re right back to where you started.

This blog post is just strawmanning for a tool that rightfully deserves to be criticized.