Learning on Someone's Dime (or an Unlead Team)
So working on my prior team was an interesting part of my life. It was a 6mo thing (luckily). In reflection, this was a really great experience for me as that it was the first time that I applied for a role without prior mastery of any part of the tech-stack. In the past I’ve tended to only follow up on roles that I have years and years of experience with every aspect of the posting. So that meant I only ever followed up on roles that involved Ruby on Rails, and I even shied away from rails postings if they mentioned a frontend framework that I had no experience with. The position I transfered into 6 months ago was on a java team (I have dabled in it, and worked with C#, but by no means have I mastered these dialects of computer-speak) and it was a Big Data team, something I have never worked with in my life in the slightest. As it would turn out, I would spend most of these six months learning how to deploy and interact with a Kafka cluster (a fancy message queue system) and would never actually get that much of a chance to work with Java other than set the guys and gals up with deploying their Jars to Artifactory (another thing I had no prior experience with).
By the end of the first couple months, I caught up with the rest of my team fairly quickly (most of the contractors on this team didn’t have a firm grasp of how git works, how bash loops work, how CI/CD works, so it wasn’t exactly a frontier, west-coast grade team, but still I have to pat myself on the back because I genuinely didn’t believe I could get my Big Data butt together the way that I did. Going into things, I did NOT think I would pull my weight the way that I did. I now look at job postings differently, with less intimidation, and legitimate scrutiny, because honestly, the posting that I read before going in discussed technology that no one on the team really knew how to work with before reading up on google and trying things out in 2-4 week research spikes.
Beyond the technology I was able to learn, and the fact that I now have 6 months of Big Data experience under my belt, I did not entirely enjoy working with the team. There were political dynamics that I really detested. Our team never had a tech lead, we had people with a strong tech work history, and people who had less history and were placed at a grade beneath us. In the absence of a tech lead, on of the other folks at my grade level just raised his voice a lot, and did what he could to control the room along with a project manager who had almost zero technical skill. The two of them would just talk to eachother about non-constructive things throughout the meetings and left very little room for actual planning. It was overall too painful to weed through the User stories, which were poorly written, yet during grooming, the PM wouldn’t fight and argue against making any changes to the stories as though he had to prove to us that he was in charge of the project. I asked to leave and because my current director is pretty amazing, he let me switch teams early!
There’s a downside here, though. As that I didn’t just go along with the absurd bs of that pair’s “strategy,” I came across as “one of the three people at the center of complaints surrounding that team.” As an enthusiest of over-achieving, this fact makes me feel a sense of failing. My director had a very kind and non-agressive way of sharing this information with me, but after hearing this, I’m left with the realization that not only was I a member of and underachieving team, but I also attracted negative attention.
Categories: team-dynamics - work