Episode 215: Many jobs in one and junior git stickler

Soft Skills Engineering - A podcast by Jamison Dance and Dave Smith - Mondays

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In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions:

Questions

  1. Listener Ryan asks,

    I am the only full-time software engineer at a relatively small company. There is also a contractor who has been with the company off and on for about 25 years.

    How do I manage playing multiple roles when the development team is so small? I take the role of software engineer, team lead, software architect, product owner, project manager, designer, QA, etc. Some of those roles are full time jobs. How do I still make progress on development (i.e. coding)?

  2. Hey guys, love the show. My question is this.

    I work in a small startup. About a year ago our team documented what our git workflow would look like. We agreed on things like rebasing instead of merging to master, and never squashing our commits into one, that sort of thing.

    One of our developers is now making a fuss about following these rules and constantly does their own thing. After speaking to them about it, they shut me down and said it is up to the individual developer to decide how they use these tools.

    There have been some heated discussion on merge requests with this person telling our senior devs that they don’t want to hear their opinions.

    This person started at the company 6 months before me, and I am only a junior engineer myself so I’m not sure if there is really anything I can do. I have been at the company for 2 years now.

    I have offered to help them learn how to use git the way our team agreed but was told “no thanks, I’ll do it my way”.

    What is the best way to navigate this situation? Is this something I should escalate to my manager, or should I just get over it?

    Thanks for the help, can’t wait to hear you rip this one apart :P