D E S I G N A T E D

Seethetarians in this thread

He’s of Italian descent.

Good luck with your new place.

Update: spoke to the Head Dev this morning and made sure I knew what my position was, so it’s definitely prioritising the project’s speed first.

Then spoke with the Senior in question and apologised for any friction, and suggested we do a debrief after the first phase of development and go back and smooth things over.

All went well! Thanks for your thoughts everyone.

I wouldn’t necessarily say OpenAPI and Composer are new technologies, they’re tried and tested and commonplace across most PHP projects. I totally get his point. He’s an older dev who’s sat comfortably for too long with an ageing stack, and now is completely behind the new guys who are coming in from other companies and wanting to change things.

I think the place we disagree is that I believe technology is a place where progression is a hard requirement of the job. Computers get better, customers get more demanding, old solutions improved. You need to improve, every day.

My issue is more when the response to a new piece of minor technology that will make our lives easily is: “I don’t want to learn YAML”.

The thing I worry about is the salary and job responsibilities. The interview for the role was completely different from what I am now doing.

It was advertised as a modernization role, and now I’m just a web developer. Do they expect the interview or the current position?

The Senior doesn’t really know Laravel or any advanced patterns that I’d expect a mid level developer to know.

I think intentionally picking the wrong solution makes you an irresponsible developer. Not only are you introducing technical debt immediately but slowing down your future progress.

But, you’re probably right about leaving him alone and letting him own these problems. I’ve suggested OpenAPI, he picked Google Docs. I’ll be there when we have to spend a few days rewriting the specs in OpenAPI.

I don’t have a career and money balance issue, this is the first role where a scenario like this has cropped up and it’s so…odd to me.

When I was a senior at the last company, I listened to absolutely everything and always had the idea in my head: “what if I’m wrong?”.

Company is about 1000 - 3000, with a dev team of about 9.

The probation period is my main worry. The project hinges a lot on me and him working well together, so I don’t want to make that not work, or make it struggle.

There’s usually a pretty solid hierarchy in UK companies, at least from a development side. You have the Junior - Mid-Level - Senior progression. It was the same at my last place (I was actually a Senior on the job role) where you have Juniors under the Mid-Level and Mid-Level under the Senior.

I always listened to other developers though, I saw the role less as a “I’m the boss” position and just that I have more responsibility for what I’m doing. If I didn’t listen to some of the Juniors (who haven’t had the time to gain some bad habits :) ), a lot of good things would have been missed.

I’m from the UK, so that might explain why I’m a bit hesitant to get confrontational. I’m still on my probation period so I don’t want to annoy and lose my role.

I like that, I think it might do some good to level with him and just ask those questions outright. I might see if I can muster up the courage to do that tomorrow morning.

He is technically higher than me on the job, as a supervisor, so it feels quite difficult to go to him and say: “Well, I think you’re wrong.”. I know it shouldn’t be difficult, but that type of conflict just isn’t something that’s common to me.

Thanks for your points, there’s some really valuable stuff here.

I’d say he’s in his early 40s, and I try not to be ageist since I’ve had some outstanding older developers that I’ve worked with, but I think he’s perhaps stuck in his ways a little bit.

Unfortunately, it’s just me and him which are building this new API with no other developer involvement. So it’s kind of like a “he said, he said” scenario. Another unfortunate to pile on top of that is that we don’t work in Agile sprints (I’ve worked that for the past 4 years so it’s quite a change for me), so I only speak to the other developers once every 1 - 2 weeks. The only daily contact I have is the “Senior” who is in charge of this specific Laravel project.

I love the idea about sitting with him and talking. At first, he seemed quite cold to me. It warmed up a bit last week but now it’s back to cold, so I’m not sure if I just caught him on a good or bad day, or if I’d said something to upset him.

He was pretty firm about not doing either the OpenAPI or Composer things today, I tried to push a little bit, politely, and just say in the nicest way I could that Google Docs wasn’t the best fit for what we needed and that we’d probably be doubling-up on our work in future. He seems very focused on the time the project will take, and it feels like he sees any suggestions as a burden.

Thanks very much for commenting.

You do realise that every single social platform favours your way of thinking? You are pretending like you aren’t fully in charge.

All you need to do is shout “my feelings!” and you get results. Like toddlers shouting for cookies.

I was one of those people, I’ve been changed. I know a lot of other people too. Maybe try to look outside of an echo chamber sometime.

Putting gay content on a Christian community is like putting a Pitbull in a nursery. It’s done only to cause a problem.

Would you put gay content in a Muslim community?

What about the phrase “sunlight is the best disinfectant”?. You can allow people to air their opinions (regardless of whether you believe they’re bigoted or not) and it’ll hurt their cause. Alex Jones is nothing but a meme now because of having a platform.

Doesn’t banning these people prove their ideas and conspiracies right and force them deeper underground?

If they aren’t promoting literal violence, leave them be. Just because they upset some people isn’t a reason to ban them.

The Westboro Baptist Church is a prime example of airing their foul opinions causing almost a complete exodus and switch on behalf of the church members. If you think you’re right, try to convince them.

I miss him, bros.

One of the ones he bought is sold on Apple’s website, so I don’t think so.