The further I get in my career, the more I hate the peers I work with /u/MocknozzieRiver CSCQ protests reddit

They think they know everything. So they’re inflexible, uncurious. They’re risk-averse at the cost of innovation and improvement. If they see a confusing block of code they don’t understand they think “this is confusing and I’m a super smart senior engineer, therefore this is designed poorly” without putting an ounce of effort into understanding it first. Consistency is king; incremental improvements be damned.

Sometimes I want to revert back to being a junior because my peers were juniors. We accepted easily that others had something to offer, that if something confused us we should understand it before criticizing it. I have magnitudes better conversations with the people who are my juniors than my peers.

It seems to me a key problem is these people believe they can live in a little bubble. That if everyone just “codes normally” they can kick it back and minimally interact with others. But that’s not how it works. Things change. Instead they whine and complain if anyone tries to do anything different; they become obstacles and frustrations for people who want to improve things.

*Obviously caveat caveat caveat I have plenty of peers that aren’t like this. But it seems more and more I’m butting heads with people like this where I didn’t before.

**I’ve had a lot of change in my career this year. My team was dissolved and I was moved to a new team. My previous team had a very healthy dynamic and encouraged improvements and trying new things; we built a lot of tools that we shared with other teams and always sought to take things to the “next level,” e.g. we put common code our services shared into a library that we made agnostic so that a few other teams started to use the library. Whereas on my new team they just… Copy paste everything. Also my mentor from my previous team retired.

I was really proud of what we did on that team because I learned a lot and I learned to spend a little extra time now to save myself time later. I learned to try new things and to really pay attention in code reviews. But now another team has our services and they complain about everything.

Kotlin? Hate it. Using Kotlin features that aren’t immediately understandable without reading documentation? Absolutely terrible (one of them literally told me they didn’t want to use companion objects lmao). Using inheritance to minimize code duplication and impose structure? Peh. Having to make a change in a library instead of in the codebase? Literally the most inconvenient, unbearable thing (honestly they probably just don’t like that I’ll review the code and I actually leave comments). Functional programming instead of iterative programming? Literally incomprehensible (even though they use Ratpack which is already functional programming-ish). Not using Java? A stupid idea, we’re a “Java shop” (even though our company started with Groovy and their tests are written in Groovy and we’ve never been a “Java shop”–we have services in Kotlin, Scala, and even Python; we write firmware in Rust).

All that to say I might be overexaggerating because I’m just extremely frustrated. 🤷‍♀️

***Obviously caveat again, all of these things can be taken too far. They’re resistant to any of these existing at all to any level.

They think they know everything. So they’re inflexible, uncurious. They’re risk-averse at the cost of innovation and improvement. If they see a confusing block of code they don’t understand they think “this is confusing and I’m a super smart senior engineer, therefore this is designed poorly” without putting an ounce of effort into understanding it first. Consistency is king; incremental improvements be damned.

Sometimes I want to revert back to being a junior because my peers were juniors. We accepted easily that others had something to offer, that if something confused us we should understand it before criticizing it. I have magnitudes better conversations with the people who are my juniors than my peers.

It seems to me a key problem is these people believe they can live in a little bubble. That if everyone just “codes normally” they can kick it back and minimally interact with others. But that’s not how it works. Things change. Instead they whine and complain if anyone tries to do anything different; they become obstacles and frustrations for people who want to improve things.

*Obviously caveat caveat caveat I have plenty of peers that aren’t like this. But it seems more and more I’m butting heads with people like this where I didn’t before.

**I’ve had a lot of change in my career this year. My team was dissolved and I was moved to a new team. My previous team had a very healthy dynamic and encouraged improvements and trying new things; we built a lot of tools that we shared with other teams and always sought to take things to the “next level,” e.g. we put common code our services shared into a library that we made agnostic so that a few other teams started to use the library. Whereas on my new team they just… Copy paste everything. Also my mentor from my previous team retired.

I was really proud of what we did on that team because I learned a lot and I learned to spend a little extra time now to save myself time later. I learned to try new things and to really pay attention in code reviews. But now another team has our services and they complain about everything.

Kotlin? Hate it. Using Kotlin features that aren’t immediately understandable without reading documentation? Absolutely terrible (one of them literally told me they didn’t want to use companion objects lmao). Using inheritance to minimize code duplication and impose structure? Peh. Having to make a change in a library instead of in the codebase? Literally the most inconvenient, unbearable thing (honestly they probably just don’t like that I’ll review the code and I actually leave comments). Functional programming instead of iterative programming? Literally incomprehensible (even though they use Ratpack which is already functional programming-ish). Not using Java? A stupid idea, we’re a “Java shop” (even though our company started with Groovy and their tests are written in Groovy and we’ve never been a “Java shop”–we have services in Kotlin, Scala, and even Python; we write firmware in Rust).

All that to say I might be overexaggerating because I’m just extremely frustrated. 🤷‍♀️

***Obviously caveat again, all of these things can be taken too far. They’re resistant to any of these existing at all to any level.