Episode 479: Contractors to the rescue and dinged for delay

Soft Skills Engineering

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions:

1. Hey skillet nation, long time skilletee first time skilleter here. I started at a scale up about 6 months ago and recently, I was asked to help with a project that was greatly behind schedule. The folks responsible for the original system are no longer at the company, and the team currently attempting to get it over the finish line have struggled greatly. The codebase is full of performance issues and the infrastructure was not set up to scale. Basically things are bad.

   Since joining, I’ve helped draft a plan to fix most of the performance issues, and then incrementally improve the architecture. Things are going great, except for the fact that we’re 6 weeks out from our deadline with a burnt out dev team.

   To resolve this, our CTO hast started to rapidly hire contractors to “help out”. As one might expect, this has only slowed us down. But our CTO, lacking trust in the previous team, has found the promises of the contractors very alluring. I, on the other hand, don’t love the idea of building this greenfield system with temporary workers and then dropping it on an already burnt out team to maintain.

   Am I overreacting? How would yall handle this scenario? How can I convince our CTO that “the mythical man month” still applies here, regardless of what the contracting company says?

2. Listener k pop demon hunters asks,

   Hello! I’m a senior engineer in a big tech company. I recently got a bad annual review from my manager due to the fact that I caused a delay happened in my last project. It was a compliance process involving multiple stakeholders and one of them didn’t give me an immediate approval for the step they owned. I promptly updated my submission for review after I got the initial feedback, pinged them in a messenger and sent a reminder mail every day until I got an approval from them. I feel absurd that I got a bad review due to the delay of external process. What could I have done this better?

   Thanks for the great show. It’s making my commute more enjoyable. Keep it up!