• 4 Posts
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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 4th, 2023

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  • I wouldn’t necessarily say OpenAPI and Composer are new technologies, they’re tried and tested and commonplace across most PHP projects. I totally get his point. He’s an older dev who’s sat comfortably for too long with an ageing stack, and now is completely behind the new guys who are coming in from other companies and wanting to change things.

    I think the place we disagree is that I believe technology is a place where progression is a hard requirement of the job. Computers get better, customers get more demanding, old solutions improved. You need to improve, every day.

    My issue is more when the response to a new piece of minor technology that will make our lives easily is: “I don’t want to learn YAML”.





  • Company is about 1000 - 3000, with a dev team of about 9.

    The probation period is my main worry. The project hinges a lot on me and him working well together, so I don’t want to make that not work, or make it struggle.

    There’s usually a pretty solid hierarchy in UK companies, at least from a development side. You have the Junior - Mid-Level - Senior progression. It was the same at my last place (I was actually a Senior on the job role) where you have Juniors under the Mid-Level and Mid-Level under the Senior.

    I always listened to other developers though, I saw the role less as a “I’m the boss” position and just that I have more responsibility for what I’m doing. If I didn’t listen to some of the Juniors (who haven’t had the time to gain some bad habits :) ), a lot of good things would have been missed.




  • Thanks for your points, there’s some really valuable stuff here.

    I’d say he’s in his early 40s, and I try not to be ageist since I’ve had some outstanding older developers that I’ve worked with, but I think he’s perhaps stuck in his ways a little bit.

    Unfortunately, it’s just me and him which are building this new API with no other developer involvement. So it’s kind of like a “he said, he said” scenario. Another unfortunate to pile on top of that is that we don’t work in Agile sprints (I’ve worked that for the past 4 years so it’s quite a change for me), so I only speak to the other developers once every 1 - 2 weeks. The only daily contact I have is the “Senior” who is in charge of this specific Laravel project.

    I love the idea about sitting with him and talking. At first, he seemed quite cold to me. It warmed up a bit last week but now it’s back to cold, so I’m not sure if I just caught him on a good or bad day, or if I’d said something to upset him.

    He was pretty firm about not doing either the OpenAPI or Composer things today, I tried to push a little bit, politely, and just say in the nicest way I could that Google Docs wasn’t the best fit for what we needed and that we’d probably be doubling-up on our work in future. He seems very focused on the time the project will take, and it feels like he sees any suggestions as a burden.