In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions:

1. I am a senior engineer working in a team of 7. My team lead went through a pretty rough divorce in December. Since then he’s been quite distracted and disengaged at work. I decided to help him out by temporarily taking on some of his responsibilities.

   Over the months things seemed to have gotten worse. He shows up late for the 10am standup meeting almost every day. He never contributes anything in stakeholder meetings. I am effectively leading the team at this stage.

   Last week we had a one-on-one meeting to conduct my annual performance review. I wanted to discuss my situation and a potential promotion/raise. Instead he spent the entire hour crying about his life situation. He also shared with me that he has been heavily drinking and doing drugs for the past few months. He is clearly in a very dark place. I have experience with depression so I was able to empathize and offer some advice. I genuinely feel bad for him and I’m a quite worried that he might not be OK.

   But now I’m in a difficult situation. I’m sleep deprived while trying to do the job of de-facto team lead/manager as well as my regular senior/IC role. I don’t think anyone in HR or management is aware of what is going on.

   I don’t know what to do about this. I feel that if I tell HR about the situation that I will be betraying his trust. (and I might even get him fired depending on how much I divulge)

   On the other hand if I do nothing then I’m the one who has to keep shouldering the burden without compensation. It’s also negativity impacting the team as I have no management experience while simultaneously my code quality is suffering.

   This is putting me under a lot of stress during a time when I’d love to spend more time with my newborn.

   Sorry for the long and difficult question. Even if you don’t answer it at least I feel better for sharing this with someone :)

2. Hi there! Long time listener, first time caller. I’ve been working at a small, seed stage startup for a little over a year as a senior IC and team lead. There are developers on another team who have been working at the company longer than me who have… questionable practices. For example, in production they set their log level to debug because they claim it is critical for them to find and fix bugs. However I’ve never seen or heard of an example of them actually using these logs to fix a problem, and this results in log spam and higher cloud costs. Whenever I try to open a dialogue about this or another one of their practices, they’re quick to deflect and insist on not changing anything. They don’t get defensive but just don’t want to do anything differently. Usually I give them my opinion and let them handle their own services but we’re seeing real financial costs to their decisions. I know our greatest costs are on people but I think we should still be responsible with our cloud spending. How can I get these other developers to Quit Their Job™ or otherwise be more open to new ideas for their practices?

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions:

1. We’ve recently switched to mandatory 2 days of in-person work a week but my employee keeps working from home! Whenever I ask him to come in person he says sure but continues to work from home. When I confront him about not showing up in person he just says “sorry I wasn’t able to make it that day”. He’s a good employee so I don’t want to fire him, but I’m concerned about what upper management will say if/when they find out about this. What should I do?

2. Hi! I am a huge fan of the podcast and a longtime listener.

   I recently made a professional judgment call in a high-stress situation that, unfortunately, did not turn out well. It was an excellent learning opportunity for me. Both my team and mentors were very supportive and said they’ve all fumbled at one point in their career.

   I was understandably reprimanded in a private meeting with my manager. I embarrassingly started crying halfway through, which I’ve NEVER done before in a professional setting.

   I momentarily excused myself to regain my composure, but even after resuming I had to keep the the tissue box close by.

   It was awkward, and I could tell my manager was very uncomfortable despite being his kind demeanor. I am worried my reaction will call my reputation and professionalism into question. Please help! How do I recover from this?

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions:

1. I’ve been working with this fintech company for the past year as the only FE developer in a team with other 6 BE developers, but recently, I’ve noticed that the product team has slowly stopped including frontend (FE) tasks in the sprints. Moreover, they seem to have deprioritized FE tasks in general, allocating me only one task that I can extend at most to three days within a two-week sprint.

   This scarcity of work has been bothering me and has left me feeling unwanted in the team, which is particularly pronounced given there’s a significant amount of FE work that needs to be done, yet these tasks still don’t seem to make it into the sprints.

   During our one-on-one sessions, my line manager has given me good feedback, which leaves me even more confused about the situation.

   I’ve raised my concerns about the lack of work with my manager, who simply suggested that I discuss the issue with the product team or feel free to tackle a backend (BE) task. When I’ve tried to engage with the product team, they usually dismiss me with non-committal responses such as “we have some work coming.” and sometimes “we’re at max capacity as of the allowed story points in a sprint, try helping where you can”. Additionally, when I’ve attempted to take on some BE tasks, my colleagues often seem too busy to guide me through this new approach, leaving me in absolute frustration.

   Other FE developers from different teams seem to be shipping loads of features. Given these circumstances, am I genuinely unwanted on my team? What further actions should I attempt before quitting my job ? any advice is appreciated.

2. I suspect one of my colleagues is either not an actual dev or not as skilled a dev as they claim to be. During meetings, whenever they are asked a question, there is always a very long pause before they unmute, and sometimes when they do unmute, I hear the tail end of a different voice answering the question before they themselves answer the question. Should I bring this up to my manager?