So, I work in a medium sized team and earlier in this year, our team helped another that was behind in some tasks that all of us need to complete together.
After this, that team always asks for help from our team for untested things from their side and the worst part is whenever something breaks on their side, it breaks for a lot of people (like us) too, and they break a lot of stuff, simply not testing anything, no unit tests, no integration tests, nothing, they just throw broken shit out of the door.
This happens even to the things we made at their place, something’s up with our code? They changed it. It doesn’t seem to matter if it’s adding 2 lines to a sql query, they added an extra comma and didn’t test, they changed the batch processing? Now the process returns a broken json with different fields than the Enum expects. Yeah, they changed the value of the field that was ALREADY working for no reason and didn’t test it.
I’m pissed off, told my coworker that it’s their problem now, but the problems always come and the boss call us to help. This is very frustrating for us and for other teams too, even today another boss was talking about them breaking things in another system that we and they interact.
Their boss seemed to just want to give work for them, even with these problems coming back. The outsourced people work better than them, but you know, they are outsourced and the not so competent team is in house, so they can do nothing.
What can I do? Just saying no when the problems come? Talking to their boss?
Is this a problem for you or merely annoying? I mean the difference between you being blamed for their poor results and you merely being inconvenienced by doing extra work.
You might need to train yourself to accept the situation as it is and hope for someone in authority to make things better. It’s not easy, but this might be a good chance for you to build that skill. 🤷
Can you talk openly with your manager about this situation? Would it be helpful to you to propose to your manager that you help that group? Maybe your manager would appreciate your attempt at leadership.
Good luck.
Just annoyed, I have some important work to do and then bam, a Teams call on the code we wrote and they broke. I would like to propose some help for them to understand better their system, yes.
Explain to your boss that it’s slowing down your work to have to take these calls. If your boss is fine with that, get in writing, ie. over email so you can’t be blamed for low productivity later. Now it’s not your problem.
If your boss isn’t fine with it impacting your work then get permission to decline these calls with “sorry I’m busy with my own work, please put something in my calendar.” Use your busy/available status in your calendar to manage when they can schedule these calls.
Good news, relatively speaking.
I’ve been where you are. Most important: don’t let yourself start to take responsibility for managerial decisions. If they want you to stand in the corner on your head and cluck like a chicken, it’s their money. 🤷 Don’t let that change how you see yourself as a programmer.
And roll your eyes in private.