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>It's infuriating to have to explain to a manager that the company's darling engineer actually suck Holy crap, yes. Well it’s not always that the darling TL su

>It's infuriating to have to explain to a manager that the company's darling engineer actually suck Holy crap, yes. Well it’s not always that the darling TL sucks but often that they themselves are in a role where they aren’t familiar with some of the tech the people working in their team are working on, so they don’t know how to properly make the large scale time estimates that get reported to the manager (and why would you ever ask the people actually working on specific tasks how long something would take? That makes too much sense and they might not tell you what you want to hear). But when they’re the darling and you’re working to meet the darling’s time estimates that were never realistic in the first place, you get thrown under the bus to the manager when time estimates fail. This actually just happened to me today. This power structure also allows the manager/TL to play good cop bad cop on their employees where all bad news/orders from manager to employee goes through the TL but all good news/orders goes directly through the manager. You can’t really win in a finger pointing game like this. The only fix is to just leave

shados 8y ago
> Well it’s not always that the darling TL sucks While I've definitely seen instances of the darling being a TL, my biggest issue is when its an individual contributor. I've had to deal with cases where the company's "ninja" was some dude who just hid in a corner pumping shitty code 18 hours a day, ignoring all pagers, requests for help, his teammates, or even his own TL. But he shipped software that kind of sortoff worked (well, as long as his teammates handled every pager notification that came every time it failed). Management loved him because of his "productivity" and hated how everyone else was so slow (because they were deleting with the fallout of his crap). It was awful.

shados 8y ago

> Well it’s not always that the darling TL sucks While I've definitely seen instances of the darling being a TL, my biggest issue is when its an individual contributor. I've had to deal with cases where the company's "ninja" was some dude who just hid in a corner pumping shitty code 18 hours a day, ignoring all pagers, requests for help, his teammates, or even his own TL. But he shipped software that kind of sortoff worked (well, as long as his teammates handled every pager notification that came every time it failed). Management loved him because of his "productivity" and hated how everyone else was so slow (because they were deleting with the fallout of his crap). It was awful.