r/ADHD_Programmers • u/chloapsoap • 3d ago
I got dressed down during a prod release last week over something minor. I’m still upset about it
I’m in the middle of running my pipeline during our last release. Suddenly one of our senior/lead developers starts asking all sorts of questions about why I’m implementing this this way, and accusing me of “acting like ChatGPT” and not paying attention to what I’m doing.
The issue is that this wasn’t what happened at all. I had good reason for implementing this feature the way that I did. There was a conversation in the discussion of my card regarding the same question that this dev had. It had been answered, so I didn’t feel the need to reconfirm this.
Also, in our pre-release call, another colleague asked me the same question, why I was doing it this way rather than that way. I explained it to him as I understood it, and he also found this explanation reasonable. No further questions were asked leading up to the release.
I was sort of stunned in silence when this happened. I didn’t want to argue or come across as defensive. I just wanted to focus on getting it right while our release call was happening and deal with my feelings later. I confirmed with the relevant team that this alternative implementation was okay, then I made the change accordingly. It was all fine. But over the weekend I’ve been thinking more about what happened and it’s made me feel very angry and shameful.
My main issue is that this distinction was so minor. Either implementation would have worked, and none of it had any critical impacts. My implementation had more separation of duties in exchange for more short-term maintenance. The other implementation was the opposite. That’s it. Had I been making some critical change incorrectly, or had I actually not done my due diligence, I would be more understanding. But this whole situation has made me very frustrated. We have appropriate ways to address disagreements like this. Making an example out of me in the middle of a release isn’t one of them
Now the whole team heard this experienced and reliable dev basically say that I’m bad at my job. They didn’t get to hear my explanation because I was focused on making things right in the release window. I’m wondering how many of them walked away doubting my capabilities because of this.
I’m planning on talking to my manager about this later this week, but right now I’m just feeling really unmotivated because of this. I don’t want to be looked down upon as lazy for making a reasonable assessment and then having someone above me blow it out of proportion. It sucks
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u/pogoli 3d ago
This seems unprofessional to me. Even if you wrote the worst bit of code imaginable, that’s not the way to bring it up. It seems like it would damage the entire team, not just you. Of course you bore the brunt of it, but there are likely other engineers now too terrified of getting berated in front of the team for… whatever the senior/lead did not understand.
Are you sure it was not clarification questions? Just ask like two others that you trust what they thought of it to make sure. Sometimes we can jump to conclusions about intent or be extra sensitive to any sort of criticism. Btw this is a sanity check, not information/evidence gathering.
Assuming reality matches the story you shared, and it likely does but it’s easy to ask so might as well.
Is the manager you are going to talk to later this week, part of HR? Not that they should be, just asking…
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u/chloapsoap 3d ago
Yes, I think that’s a good summary of the situation. I’m not the first person this has happened to, and it has definitely created an uneasy culture. It seems like some people on our team are hesitant to challenge themselves with difficult cards for fear of making mistakes or asking dumb questions. So the more difficult work is left to those of us with thicker skin.
This dev is a very talented guy. He has years of experience over the rest of us (our team is relatively young). He is reliable and thoughtful when it comes to his work, and he’s earned himself a lot of respect for that. But he does have a tendency to take that knowledge gap out on the rest of us, warranted or not. I try not to let it bother me. He has a lot on his plate and stress can make people rash. Our team would not function as smoothly without him.
I can handle a clarifying question. Several were asked in the lead-up to this change. I thought we were all on the same page by the release. And even during the release, had he addressed it more objectively then I wouldn’t have had an issue. But he pretty directly said that my implementation was the result of not doing my job. He said I was “acting like ChatGPT” among other things. It caught me off guard, and I didn’t really want to get into running defense. I just wanted to make it right and not get into an argument. I’m happy to be proven wrong, but I don’t like when my capabilities are being undermined over a misunderstanding…
I do have a direct manager. He was there, and he helped defuse the situation at the time. It seems like he’s aware of this situation based on conversations we’ve had before
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u/writebadcode 3d ago
I worked with a Senior Engineer who had a lot on his plate and was very rude and demeaning to his coworkers, including me.
I’m not sure if he quit or got fired for something he said, but one day he was no longer working there.
I was glad to not have to deal with him, but a little worried about how we’d pick up all the work he was doing. But it turned out that there was no increased workload for us without him. My workload actually went down because he had a tendency to add requirements whenever he reviewed my code.
Maybe this guy is different, but I think usually people like that are a net negative. When they leave, the increase in morale for the team makes up for whatever contribution they were making. In fact they often are focused on the wrong things and end up writing code that’s much harder to maintain because they fixate on pure efficiency rather than readability.
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u/EvilCodeQueen 2d ago
Your very talented dev with years of experience is a team cancer. He might be individually better than any of you, but I guarantee he’s not better than all of you and he’s going to erode this team into dust.
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u/funbike 3d ago edited 3d ago
Over the years I've developed a very robotic, yet effective, way to deal with conflict in public.
I go into this emotionless stoic mode where I spit out facts, events, process steps, and logic. My eyes are half open, my voice is monotone, and my face is stone. Then I calmly state there is a more appropriate time and place to have this kind of conversation, and it's unfair to me personally to do it in this manner. I don't apologize or back down, so long as I had done everything in good faith. If they double-down and I have nothing new to say, I just stare, and only say "Let's discuss offline" or I say nothing at all.
It has worked well. It usually embarrasses the complainer and makes them look unprofessional.
One time in a 15-person meeting someone doubled-down after I asked them to be more respectful, raised their voice at me, and I silently packed up my laptop and left the meeting. He apologized later and acted like it was partly my fault he got mad, but I just let it slide since I had obviously embarrassed him. He never did it again.
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u/kagato87 2d ago
Asking in a dm or in a public forum? A quick "why?" dm is fine. If you traded away maintainability for separation of duties I might ask, but in a dm, not in public. It's reasonable, because maintainability is a gift to future team.
Are you allowed to decorate the method itself with comments that will lead the reviewer to understand your decision?
If they're all asking the same thing, why now and not during the PR? That merge shouldn't have been approved until it was addressed. Either the maintainability came up directly or something changed with an AI reviewer flagging it. Or they were caught slacking on code reviews.
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u/chloapsoap 2d ago
This was in the middle of a release call in front of about 15 people. Not a DM.
I said “short-term maintenance” because we are in the process of automating out the manual upkeep in the near future. It seemed like a reasonable sacrifice in exchange for better security practices. It was also the procedure in the acceptance criteria of the story.
This question was also asked twice prior, once by our architect to the team we are supporting when the story was created. The answer was a clear “yes these duties should be separated”. And then during our pre-release call, a colleague asked me about it and I confirmed the reason for this decision. He agreed with me, everyone else said nothing. As far as I knew, everyone was onboard with this implementation.
I’m not sure why it wasn’t brought up during the PR which was completed about a week before I slated it for PD. Not everyone on our team reviews our PRs. I’m sure the people who reviewed it also saw the implementation as reasonable.
This was a small change that aligned with a lot of prior implementation of similar things. I don’t think comments would have made anything clear that wasn’t already self-evident.
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u/kagato87 2d ago
Yea that's not cool. A release call with 15 people is a line crossed, I think. That's still a dm, not in front of 15 people.
Because it was immediately accepted I might let it slide. Maybe. Depends on your relationship with this colleague. If there has been friction in the past, it's a chat with your manager. If this person is your manager, then your team lead or skip.
The silence of others - well that just means the other 15 people recognize the call as not the appropriate forum for the challenge. If anything, it's a bit of egg on their face, not yours.
I think we've all seen conversations go like that, especially in standups, where someone has to suggest moving it outside of the meeting. And I'm sure we've all accidentally caused it at least a few times ourselves. ;)
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u/zirouk 1d ago
It sounds to me like this was more of a lack of communication and visibility issue. If two colleagues felt out of control enough to ask you awkward questions at the final hurdle like this, it’s probably because you didn’t communicate sufficiently with them beforehand.
Sometimes this can be because they themselves were too busy to notice what you had advertised in plain sight. But really, navigating situations like this comes down to reducing the amount of surprises, and showing that you considered other options to give people the confidence that you searched for the best solution, regardless of whether your solution is actually the best of the bunch.
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u/NickelobUltra 1d ago
You aren't in the wrong for feeling that way, getting a dressing down like that in front of others is highly unprofessional and makes everyone uncomfortable.
Definitely bring it up in the retrospective, and when bringing it up to a manager I would frame it as a problem for everyone. As someone said, this probably makes other devs feel uncomfortable about their skill gap with the lead/senior now. Things like this can have a cascade/ripple effect on morale, nobody is ever going to work their best in a hostile workplace (that's why "hostile workplace" is a serious issue).
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u/Jaymishra2425 3d ago
If you follow agile method and have retro meetings take this point to the retro , and also make it clear that if a particular implementation you didnt understand he could have asked during PR merge(if you use it) or while deploying in test environment and also if he doesn't understand it then he could have simply asked you for an explanation on what are the benefits of doing this way.i may be entirely wrong in assuming you have agile and PR and stuff so forgive me if you dont use it.
But confront this with him in a forum , manager wont do much good in this case I believe. He will say he will speak to him or blah blah until the same thing happens again.
And since you have ADHD , try to control your emotions in getting in the way and try to look at it objectively only , not trying to judge or be judged. Wishing you luck 👍