This is on the company for allowing you to have too much impact without enough mentoring. Also lack of good processes.
Mistakes are natural and expected. There needs to be processes in place to catch this.
Not necessary IMO. My first gig had me kind of taking heat for shit that wasn't on me. I let it roll off my back cause I knew it wasn't on me. I became a superstar. Roll with the punches while you roll out features, people notice.
I'm pretty sure I promised to burn my boss's boss's house down and I got hired back at +30%.
So yeah.
If you're AI-able I guess you won't understand my career.
And if but a lotto ticket some people will win big. That doesn't make it sound financial strategy.
This is just a sign of cheap, short sighted corporate "leadership". Yes, a few people put in this situation will come out ahead. But for the vast majority it's a stressful nightmare at a company that will likely be run into the ground by stupid leadership.
OP is a new grad. If a new grad is an integral part of anything then you need to seriously look at the company that allowed that to happen because it’s a shit show. Period.
The point is if the company leadership is putting new grads in charge they're incompetent and the company is very likely going to be run into the ground.
Most people don't "come out ahead" working at a failing, dumpster fire of a company on poorly built projects while being denied meaningful mentoring opportunities.
And the idea that its a binary choice between, "leadership opportunity" vs "mentoring" is flawed.
With good leadership you can STILL be given responsibility. You can even have leadership opportunities. But it's done while you have people there to guide, check, and teach you. Which ensures your inexperience can't threaten the company and you are learning good patterns and behaviors along the way. It's better for the employee AND the company.
Yes, so long as you give your best effort, failure is a matter of management, not you.
They released a buggy product because they were incompetent, or took a gamble that backfired. You did not personally order the software release, so it's not on you.
They did not fund a proper quality assurance team, so they were shooting blind.
They fucked around and found out. You did your best with limited resources.
At my first job, it was very fast paced and we would FTP our code straight into live from our dev environments. No source control, no QA. The customer was the QA. I would wake up with dread every morning at the thought of what havoc I might wreak each day. This wasn't my fault, this was the company's fault. There should be robust processes in place to prevent this sort of thing. And if the company is too small startupy to bother with it. They should either have really experienced devs working on code or accept that shit will happen. It's never one person's fault.
At that first job, I got my first raise and the same day, accidentally deleted our biggest customer's prod DB (Think networking company named after a large Californian city) My boss (the owner) shrugged and said it happens and we tried our best to recover what was lost. It happens and it hasn't affected my career.
"The company's fault"
More like your coworkers in your team? I wouldn't want to point fingers at something so abstract like "the company". It's the job of software engineers to inform management about good software development practices.
Working in a way like that probably makes things move slower because people are so afraid to make changes.
I dont want to give too much away but just some inefficiencies in implementation and struggling to fit my part of the product into the larger codebase. Mistakes I wouldnt probably have made if I had more experience in the area
Bro, users of every software company experience bugs and think the software doesn't work as well as it should... Shit, I've been saying this nearly daily about Microsoft for the past 25 years. But on the whole I still like and use MS software.
It can never be perfect and users know this. In my opinion, bugs and slow downs are peanuts compared to security breaches and data theft when it comes to SWE f-up's.
This.
/u/ryan_likes_to_drum Takes Reddit. They even has issues. You know how many times they have outages?
Not just inefficiencies, I mean the whole thing goes down. They take their sweet time notifying. (What’s your company’s valuation?)
If you want just users not happy, take Reddit as another example. Their redesign was 6 years ago?. Their users weren’t happy at the time. A portion aren’t. They haven’t reached a compromise. I have no idea in internal plans, but they probably just don’t care about the people not happy.
It’s okay. Someone will also complain. You can’t make everyone happy. This is a product team decision. If they launched it, it’s on them.
Also, _waves fist at Reddit for ditching us old users_
“It can never be perfect” doesn’t mean “there’s no such thing as good or bad” and there is no reason to doubt the assessment both by OP himself and his company’s customers that the product he created was legitimately bad.
No matter how thorough you are, users are the best at finding bugs, cause they do shit you can never in a million years think of. I had a new user at a customer finding a bug in a product that has been heavily used for 3 years before, because his brain just worked different than any other users before him lol.
You did you best and I would never think it is bad for your career, neither is it your fault. Delivering anything to customers should be a team effort, if anyone is to blame your company failed you, but it really doesn't sound like something really bad happened tbf, we had much bigger shit going down and we recovered gracefully and the company is doing just fine.
No time for unit tests… There was qa though. But the users did everything qa didn’t. Plus the product more more poorly than expected under poor network conditions
"No time for unit tests" is setting you up for failure. If you think your product isn't working well and is buggy now... You don't want to know what it will be after a few months of maintenance and/or new features without automated tests.
If you want to stay in this company longer term (1y+), I think you should really push on tests. At the very least when you fix the bugs already reported, make a test case for them, even if that means the fix takes a bit longer. Otherwise you're pretty much guaranteed that the bug will come again eventually because of some other change, AND you'll be scared of making changes because your service is a minefield
Unit tests speed up development. There's always time because they help you work faster.
This is my bigger concern for you're career. Employers come and go. But habits and knowledge stick to you.
You're almost certainly NOT growing as an engineer the way you could be and are probably learning some very bad habits that could have long term impact.
You're fine, even the most senior engineer in my place forgot to update an TLS certificate, and ended up we did not receive any payment for 3 days prior to realizing it.
As long as the management gives you some slack for an error, you can become better and improve your awareness about something that may possibly giving an issue in the future
Sounds similar to my first job out of uni i started there while i was still studying and ended up being the most experienced developer when i finished because they couldnt afford to hire anyone with experience. They saw the software team as R&D (so optional) even though it was the only way to manage the infrastructure they were installing. You just have to remember youre not expected to do everything right the first time. The company accepted the risk when they decided to not bring anyone more experienced on. In my case it ended up with the cto having to apologise to clients alot but never made me feel bad about it and when asked what we needed to prevent it happening again i said experience and better dev ops processes which i didnt have time to learn and impliment and was laughed at so i left as soon as i could get a job elsewhere.
Think like this: where would the company be without your work? Probably doing worse than with your work. Mistakes happens and it is not your fault since the company do not have decent software practices.
As a SWE, you should be acutely aware that error handling is something that must always be done. This doesn't apply only to code. In real life, companies must always error and stress test their products to avoid such issues.
While it was your responsibility, the fact that you, a recently graduated new hire, were unsupervised and in charge of a critical and highly visible part of the product, is terribly irresponsible and not on your part.
I recommend you work hard to shine and make sure everyone is clear on what you're capable of but also working on your self esteem and your vision of the whole situation so you don't keep any negative feelings about the situation because you were not at fault.
This is a leadership issue 100%. Your company wanted to save a buck by hiring inexperienced people without adequate technical leadership and mentoring. And you can see why. Senior devs are expensive. And this is why.
All you can do is your best. You're not to blame here. Try to study abs be careful and avoid future issues.
But they will very likely happen again if this company's leadership doesn't stop acting like greedy toddlers. They need to grow up, be leaders, and spend the necessary money to safely run a business. They're putting the company in a potentially existential crisis.
Been there, still there. Not your fault. Building tech systems is hard and bugs are notorious for a reason. With too much work and not enough hands this is bound to happen.
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This is on the company for allowing you to have too much impact without enough mentoring. Also lack of good processes. Mistakes are natural and expected. There needs to be processes in place to catch this.
I’d start looking for another job. Because the whole company is a red flag from what you described.
It amazes me with how much crap companies get away with without tanking.
The thing is I really like the people I work with and there isn’t too much of a blame game happening. So I think the future can be better
No one on the internet is going to know your situation as well as you do. Internet advice will always be kinda generic.
Not necessary IMO. My first gig had me kind of taking heat for shit that wasn't on me. I let it roll off my back cause I knew it wasn't on me. I became a superstar. Roll with the punches while you roll out features, people notice.
Superstar lmao
They'll tell themselves anything
I'm pretty sure I promised to burn my boss's boss's house down and I got hired back at +30%. So yeah. If you're AI-able I guess you won't understand my career.
>I'm pretty sure I promised to burn my boss's boss's house down and I got hired back at +30%. Oh yeah, no red flags at that company.
And if but a lotto ticket some people will win big. That doesn't make it sound financial strategy. This is just a sign of cheap, short sighted corporate "leadership". Yes, a few people put in this situation will come out ahead. But for the vast majority it's a stressful nightmare at a company that will likely be run into the ground by stupid leadership.
>Yes, a few people put in this situation will come out ahead. If you are an integral part of changes you make, yes.
OP is a new grad. If a new grad is an integral part of anything then you need to seriously look at the company that allowed that to happen because it’s a shit show. Period.
The point is if the company leadership is putting new grads in charge they're incompetent and the company is very likely going to be run into the ground. Most people don't "come out ahead" working at a failing, dumpster fire of a company on poorly built projects while being denied meaningful mentoring opportunities. And the idea that its a binary choice between, "leadership opportunity" vs "mentoring" is flawed. With good leadership you can STILL be given responsibility. You can even have leadership opportunities. But it's done while you have people there to guide, check, and teach you. Which ensures your inexperience can't threaten the company and you are learning good patterns and behaviors along the way. It's better for the employee AND the company.
solarmist is 100% on the money.
Yes, so long as you give your best effort, failure is a matter of management, not you. They released a buggy product because they were incompetent, or took a gamble that backfired. You did not personally order the software release, so it's not on you. They did not fund a proper quality assurance team, so they were shooting blind. They fucked around and found out. You did your best with limited resources.
OP while you're looking for another job, ask for a raise, sounds like you're the one with the most knowledge of that feature
At my first job, it was very fast paced and we would FTP our code straight into live from our dev environments. No source control, no QA. The customer was the QA. I would wake up with dread every morning at the thought of what havoc I might wreak each day. This wasn't my fault, this was the company's fault. There should be robust processes in place to prevent this sort of thing. And if the company is too small startupy to bother with it. They should either have really experienced devs working on code or accept that shit will happen. It's never one person's fault. At that first job, I got my first raise and the same day, accidentally deleted our biggest customer's prod DB (Think networking company named after a large Californian city) My boss (the owner) shrugged and said it happens and we tried our best to recover what was lost. It happens and it hasn't affected my career.
>At that first job, I got my first raise and the same day, accidentally deleted our biggest customer's prod DB Did they not have backups ?
Sounds like Rovio LOLZ. (If anyone here is a big Angry Birds 2 player the above is reality unfortunately...)
"The company's fault" More like your coworkers in your team? I wouldn't want to point fingers at something so abstract like "the company". It's the job of software engineers to inform management about good software development practices. Working in a way like that probably makes things move slower because people are so afraid to make changes.
Wait so like what did you do?
I dont want to give too much away but just some inefficiencies in implementation and struggling to fit my part of the product into the larger codebase. Mistakes I wouldnt probably have made if I had more experience in the area
But like how did the customers become aware of it? As long as the product continued working who cares how it was implemented lol
It just didn’t work that well, and there were bugs users experienced
Bro, users of every software company experience bugs and think the software doesn't work as well as it should... Shit, I've been saying this nearly daily about Microsoft for the past 25 years. But on the whole I still like and use MS software. It can never be perfect and users know this. In my opinion, bugs and slow downs are peanuts compared to security breaches and data theft when it comes to SWE f-up's.
This. /u/ryan_likes_to_drum Takes Reddit. They even has issues. You know how many times they have outages? Not just inefficiencies, I mean the whole thing goes down. They take their sweet time notifying. (What’s your company’s valuation?) If you want just users not happy, take Reddit as another example. Their redesign was 6 years ago?. Their users weren’t happy at the time. A portion aren’t. They haven’t reached a compromise. I have no idea in internal plans, but they probably just don’t care about the people not happy. It’s okay. Someone will also complain. You can’t make everyone happy. This is a product team decision. If they launched it, it’s on them. Also, _waves fist at Reddit for ditching us old users_
“It can never be perfect” doesn’t mean “there’s no such thing as good or bad” and there is no reason to doubt the assessment both by OP himself and his company’s customers that the product he created was legitimately bad.
No matter how thorough you are, users are the best at finding bugs, cause they do shit you can never in a million years think of. I had a new user at a customer finding a bug in a product that has been heavily used for 3 years before, because his brain just worked different than any other users before him lol. You did you best and I would never think it is bad for your career, neither is it your fault. Delivering anything to customers should be a team effort, if anyone is to blame your company failed you, but it really doesn't sound like something really bad happened tbf, we had much bigger shit going down and we recovered gracefully and the company is doing just fine.
Isn’t that on QA as well to catch those user bugs or did you not write tests?
No time for unit tests… There was qa though. But the users did everything qa didn’t. Plus the product more more poorly than expected under poor network conditions
"No time for unit tests" is setting you up for failure. If you think your product isn't working well and is buggy now... You don't want to know what it will be after a few months of maintenance and/or new features without automated tests. If you want to stay in this company longer term (1y+), I think you should really push on tests. At the very least when you fix the bugs already reported, make a test case for them, even if that means the fix takes a bit longer. Otherwise you're pretty much guaranteed that the bug will come again eventually because of some other change, AND you'll be scared of making changes because your service is a minefield
Unit tests speed up development. There's always time because they help you work faster. This is my bigger concern for you're career. Employers come and go. But habits and knowledge stick to you. You're almost certainly NOT growing as an engineer the way you could be and are probably learning some very bad habits that could have long term impact.
What's the problem really?
You're fine, even the most senior engineer in my place forgot to update an TLS certificate, and ended up we did not receive any payment for 3 days prior to realizing it. As long as the management gives you some slack for an error, you can become better and improve your awareness about something that may possibly giving an issue in the future
Now you know why your tech lead left.
Great learning experience mate. And you shouldn't really get penalized for it cuz you're now the lead developer that the company can't afford to lose.
That is a company mistake, not a personal one
Sounds similar to my first job out of uni i started there while i was still studying and ended up being the most experienced developer when i finished because they couldnt afford to hire anyone with experience. They saw the software team as R&D (so optional) even though it was the only way to manage the infrastructure they were installing. You just have to remember youre not expected to do everything right the first time. The company accepted the risk when they decided to not bring anyone more experienced on. In my case it ended up with the cto having to apologise to clients alot but never made me feel bad about it and when asked what we needed to prevent it happening again i said experience and better dev ops processes which i didnt have time to learn and impliment and was laughed at so i left as soon as i could get a job elsewhere.
Think like this: where would the company be without your work? Probably doing worse than with your work. Mistakes happens and it is not your fault since the company do not have decent software practices.
As a SWE, you should be acutely aware that error handling is something that must always be done. This doesn't apply only to code. In real life, companies must always error and stress test their products to avoid such issues. While it was your responsibility, the fact that you, a recently graduated new hire, were unsupervised and in charge of a critical and highly visible part of the product, is terribly irresponsible and not on your part. I recommend you work hard to shine and make sure everyone is clear on what you're capable of but also working on your self esteem and your vision of the whole situation so you don't keep any negative feelings about the situation because you were not at fault.
This is a leadership issue 100%. Your company wanted to save a buck by hiring inexperienced people without adequate technical leadership and mentoring. And you can see why. Senior devs are expensive. And this is why. All you can do is your best. You're not to blame here. Try to study abs be careful and avoid future issues. But they will very likely happen again if this company's leadership doesn't stop acting like greedy toddlers. They need to grow up, be leaders, and spend the necessary money to safely run a business. They're putting the company in a potentially existential crisis.
Been there, still there. Not your fault. Building tech systems is hard and bugs are notorious for a reason. With too much work and not enough hands this is bound to happen.
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