Episode 469: Passed over for lead role and perhaps I'm the jerk

Soft Skills Engineering

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions:

1. I’m a long time listener to the podcast. Thanks for reading and answering my question!

   I have over 20+ yrs experience as a manual QA and 6+ yrs experience as a SDET. I’m in a new role as a hybrid manual QA / SDET for a company that hasn’t had QA for a few years. After a couple of months a new hire was added to support a new project in non-development or QA tasks. While waiting for the launch of the new project, senior leadership decided to have this new hire to help me with QA. They have no experience in QA or coding. I spent a considerable amount of time training them, and found it difficult.

   After a few months my manager told me the hire will transition to lead QA. They will NOT be my supervisor or manager. I will be answering directly to the manager as before. I feel sidelined since I didn’t get hired on as a Sr. or Lead role. I’ve already been left out of numerous meetings catered to team leads only.

   The new hire is very vocal in meetings. They repeat my ideas as their own, and speak for me when I don’t agree. It’s exhausting to hold back ideas from the new hire or correct them and add context to the rest of the team when I disagree.

   I’m worried I’m training this new QA lead to be my replacement. What are your thoughts? I feel like the company culture is chaotic for the long term. Any thoughts what I should do in the short term and long term?

2. Hi Dave and Jamison (as a unit would you answer to Davison?). Long time listener, first time caller.

   I recently joined a data-engineering team at chill 90s multi-national tech company. My boss and I are based in the UK, and two more junior engineers who do the bulk of the IC work are based in India. These two engineers seem to work hard, have far more domain knowledge and technical ability than me, and generally seem to do most of the work. There’s also a senior engineer who’s kind of absent.

   My boss is a ‘red personality’ who’s been at the org for at least a decade, who doesn’t seem as close to the technical detail. He cares about the destination and wants to get there yesterday, but discussions about ‘ways of working’ or the specifics of achieving the output seem to bore him. He characterizes such talk as risk-aversion.

   I’m shocked by some of the technical details. Tooling chosen specifically to bypass version control, editing Jupyter Notebooks to deploy changes to ‘production’, dashboards that seem to have totally wrong data, etc.

   It seems like they will do the minimum required to make things ‘work’ and then move on. Scalability or making things interpret-able for others just doesn’t seem to weigh on their mind. It’s then me as the new-joiner navigating their hacky code who inevitably wanders into all the pitfalls and gotchas.

   I’ve tried to advocate for better practices and lead by example. They nod along, but ultimately seem resistant to change. I need their help and experience with the codebase, but I also have this creeping sense that their working style is too sloppy and unprofessional. They don’t report to me, and our mutual boss seems happy with the work. I feel a bit like the guy in Twilight Zone: I can see a gremlin wrecking the plane, but nobody else can see it, and my attempts to address the situation just seem a bit hysterical.

   What’s worse, my gentle attempts at flagging the issues with my boss haven’t gone down well. In my first performance review my boss mentioned something about a ‘us versus them attitude’ and ‘assuming good intent’.

   What do you make of this situation? Am I the a-hole? Have you faced this sort of thing in the past? Is it time to consider old-reliable? Is 4 months too soon to quit a job?