|
ah yes, the ol' bait and switch. It's fair to point out that employers aren't the only ones who do this, employees are guilty of it too. I've certainly seen it happen where people were hired to write code for a particular project and instead try to do an entirely different job ("what we really need to be working on is a mobile site!", "what we really need is a scrum master!"). However, employers sure do promise autonomy and a creative role, only to attempt to turn that new developer into someone who is supposed to check JIRA in the morning and fix bugs or implement a narrow set of features defined (with little to no creative input), often with a corrupted form of agile that turns the daily standup into a daily application of deadline pressures and demands for status reports. I've come to realize how valuable some of those stuffy old bureaucratic pratices really can be for me, as a developer. For instance, I have gotten a great deal of value out of formalized, written job description with everyone's signature on it, filed away with HR. Once you're in a relatively senior technical role, you will almost certainly have language like "determines technical requirements", "aligns software architecture with business interests", "makes technology choices", and so forth. These will often have a little percentage next to them, as if we can somehow explicitly state how much of your time these things will take. "Writes code to implement features" and "performs other IT duties as required" will probably also be in there, but it's unlikely, if you're in a senior role, that these will be more than 50% of your job description (certainly not that last one). This works well, because if you're accused of "not doing what you were hired to do" when you refuse to maintain an old pile of crap without a clear path toward a better code base (where you determine the technology, business alignment, and architecture), or if people tell you the project that you believe clearly aligns with the needs of the business is your "pet project" and what you really need to do is complete those JIRA tickets, it's usually pretty easy to point to your job description (with everyone's signature on it) and make a very compelling case that you are in fact doing exactly what you were hired to do, and that someone else (often a project manager or business unit manager) is trying to grab job authority that aren't in his or her description, but are clearly in yours. You can also make the case that while you're always willing to pitch in and do what is needed, random tech tasks have greatly exceeded the percentage of your time they are supposed to be taking. One thing I've slowly learned - the looseness and casualness of the software industry doesn't necessarily favor developers. Sometimes a formalized set of rules can really help us. |