Where have your manners gone? Colleagues in IT

There was a company that I really wanted to join, but conversations with the HR manager gradually and step by step pushed me away from this decision. It all starts with rather long answers to questions with a gap of several hours to several days, and then the thought generally arises, do they need me as an employee in the absence of any interest in myself?

The HR manager kept me in some emotional tension and did not keep in touch with me. For example, we agreed to discuss the company and the vacancy, but then he disappeared for several days and then suddenly returned and scheduled an interview. Some feedback was promised after the interview, but after 3 days no one has contacted me. At this point I started to have doubts, thinking that it was just bad organization and that I had wasted my time. However, after 1.5 weeks, the manager appeared again out of nowhere and offered me an offer, including a security check, after which he disappeared again for a week.

My opinion of the company has already been formed, and I lost trust due to the initial experience of interaction. Doubts arise: What if I accept their offer, quit, and then they disappear again and I find myself without a job? After all, an HR manager is the face of the company, and how I will perceive this company depends on his behavior.

Be attentive during the code review, because you need to criticize your colleague’s code.

Code reviews for developers are a special kind of pleasure. In my opinion, code review should include maintaining a consistent code style, sharing knowledge, finding bugs, and collaborating. However, there are situations when an ordinary merge request turns into a kind of thread on Dvacha, where everyone wants to express their personal preferences and vision of the project.

One day I was working on developing a shared library for the entire development shop and made some small changes to logging to improve performance. When I created the merge request, a real nightmare began. I received more than 70 comments from three people, not only on my changes, but also on what they saw in the project, as well as on their wishes regarding the code style.

Everyone had to answer that this remark did not apply to the task, and some of the wishes did not coincide with the uniform code style adopted in the development workshop. They agreed that their comments were not relevant and when I started collecting approvals, they tried to look for more and more new comments, since their previous one did not receive approval. The most interesting thing is that they started arguing with other people who made comments.

In the end, it took several days to deal with everyone and respond to all their comments, as well as correct only a few of the 70 proposed changes. In my opinion, this behavior is also a manifestation of some toxicity, since the goal is not to help improve the code, but to simply bombard the person with comments and spend days looking for a problem where there may not be one.

Be respectful to your parents, relatives and manager Ivan from your company.

If you work, but have not yet encountered toxic managers, then you are probably a very lucky person or just starting your professional journey. In my experience, such situations periodically arose and I had to figure out how to repel such people. This is the situation I want to describe.

Another business task came to me, already with prepared documentation and an agreed upon architectural solution from the managers. It would seem that he simply took it, implemented it, tested it and released it, but manager Ivan decided to demonstrate his importance, and the release was delayed indefinitely.

It all started with the approval of a merge request for the release branch. Requests to review and approve were initially ignored, because Ivan was very busy coordinating other merge requests. After he finally agreed to look at ours, and decided to fulfill the request of the pathetic worm (the author), minor quibbles and constant questions about the implementation began. When adequate answers were received, he disappeared again for several days.

Customers are already expecting functionality in production, but I still can’t get approval from our manager. This forces me to raise the question in retrospect: why did this manager take on the responsibility of coordinating all the tasks in the release and cannot do his job on time? Perhaps he is an extra link in this bureaucratic chain. Other developers also report such problems, and our team lead decides to have a conversation with Ivan and speed up the process.

The result of this conversation was that Ivan refuses to approve these modifications, arguing that he is not satisfied with the architectural solution, although he had previously approved it. He tells me that I should look at his schedule on the calendar and set up a meeting with my team lead and analyst, and I am not mentioned in this meeting. And the conversation takes place in a tone as if I were a secretary, and he was my boss, although in the legal structure my manager, my team leader.

I decide to pass this information on to my team lead and then he goes to deal with our manager. As a result of this action, the release was delayed for 2 months and many calls and meetings, but the functionality was released in the form in which it was originally developed.

And here the question arises: why is all this necessary? Why, when some become pillars of the bureaucracy, they begin not to solve problems, but to create new ones? I think all this happens because you need to show management how much you depend on it and how hard you work, even if that work has no real meaning.

Conclusion

Toxic behavior will never make other people perform better and will never bring anything good other than temporary self-gratification. It is important to work together and help each other solve problems, and not create them from scratch. A good team atmosphere is as important as other indicators.

And to those who encounter toxic substances, I want to say, “You don’t have to endure it.”

Thank you for your attention!