I've been there. Even the promises/deadlines the previous guy agreed upon are now yours to keep.

Yup, exactly this.

:fist: solidarity

Understand 100% like @U0525KG62 said, solidarity

Thanks guys. The worst part of this job is the fact that there are no other devs who will listen to your rants when things are tough.

Happy to do that! Rant away.

We’re here to support each other.

Indeed. Unload in a safe space 🙂

I think every developer has experience of this.

Probably. Just feels extra lonesome when no one's around to complain to.

maybe you already do this - can you make your task/project queue visible so that everyone can see your workload and progression, and then leave the various demanders to battle it out amongst themselves for priority ?

It’s not really possible. I don’t work in a traditional software dev shop, but as a supporting developer in a university research centre. My workload is split between projects with lots of external actors, many from other universities or research institutes, and there is really no uniform way show them my progress. In fact, no one really likes to state what the requirements are since they’re too busy with writing papers and looking for funds, so I’m left to guess. And it’s not as if what I produce comes in small deliverables either, most of it’s greenfield development where I needs lots of hammock time and framework building time, while the rest is limited DevOps stuff which I mostly just allocate to whenever I wake up to an email chain of frustrated end users, resulting in me having to throw out whatever I was planning on doing and log in to some ancient server to do detective work for a day or two. My work is either bounded by my predecessors guarantees or by tiny academic research budgets, including researchers allocating most of the funds to themselves while expecting me to deliver 200% of what was promised in half the time. All I can do is tell them that their demands are unrealistic and that we should try to follow some kind of structured development process, but these are people in their 60s or 70s we’re talking about.

The flipside is that I get to be the architect, backend dev, frontend dev, UX designer, and project manager all at once. So I make lots of Clojure code, because no one else will get involved anyway.

But suffice to say, it can be a bit stressful sometimes.

Perhaps these are the reasons why your predecessor left? Burn-out?

One of my first jobs, many moons ago, was working for a university as an application developer. I too had a similar impression about working there (admittingly, it was nowhere near as pressurised as you are describing, this is really pre 2000, so a more tranquil pace of development), but the similarities are there. No-one wants to "own" anything, because most people are there just to chase papers, funding or to wait until they are at pension age (universities usually have really excellent pension schemes).

Working in a business is like night/day re: development.

First of all, hang in there! We’ve all been in situation of unreasonable demands are put on us and it’s not a fun place, especially if you care about the quality of work your work. Don’t feel bad about missing some of those deliverables, clearly it’s impossible to meet all those demands. You can only do so much! Secondly, do you have a boss you could talk to about prioritising firefighting on old server Ops vs work on new projects. I understand it might be fuzzy in this setting, but there is always someone who is singing checks, right?

I’ve talked to my boss, but she’s really laissez-faire about things - and there isn’t much she can do anyway, since she’s bound by what the budget allows. There is no one else on the payroll to do the DevOps firefighting, while at the same time one of the other projects I’m on had a delayed start by ~8 months (the gap between my predecessor leaving and me arriving), without changing the deadline or the expectations. And I just had a kid, so I’m talking some time off for that too, which obviously leaves less time for work.

Anyway, universities are a very unique place to work at. Like @U11EL3P9U describes, there is very little ownership. People operate as free radicals and organise into little workgroups around projects, and everything fits together in an incredibly loose way. It’s hard to describe what it’s like. Even my boss doesn’t really feel or act like a boss. Everyone is kinda in it for themselves alone.

Sometimes I toy with the idea of going back into academia, but I quickly wise up 🙂. It would fustrate the hell out of me to work there - and well, pay is a lot lower too 🙂

still, you do meet some interesting people 😉

I actually got a significant pay rise when I got this job, probably because they knew they would be screwed if I left soon after. I was severely underpaid at my last gig.

I meant talk to the boss and ask her what has higher priority (2 projects or DevOps etc.), because you can’t do everything and balls will be dropped. Agree this with her and then just use this when making decisions on what to work

🫂

Hugs to you @U4P4NREBY

and yes, feel free to rant here as much as you like.

@UGTMGK0Q4 I did have that talk with her already in autumn, but she doesn’t really care because she’s only directly involved with 1/3 of my actual work, even though she’s technically my boss. The only thing she gets directly involved in is how I roughly divide my time between projects (we structure project time every year by allocated months taken from the budget), but actual management of the projects are left to project leaders, who are all similarly uncaring/focused on their other responsibilities, i.e. not management or any kind of scope reduction. Like I said, it’s hard to describe what it’s like here. Try to imagine the ultimate multidimensional organisational matrix structure :P

true, I’ve never worked for a university. All I’m trying to say, make sure you CYA with your boss (fine if she doesn’t care, she might start to care once people start complaining to her) and then don’t feel bad about not being able to solve everyone’s problems.

also, apologies for trying to solve your problems, while all you wanted is to vent a little bit 🙂 Please rant as much as you need

No, suggestions are totally fine 🙂 but you’re right that I mostly needed to vent.

you have every right