[craigzucchini]

Lots of conceited sounding comments here from devs who either have an inflated sense of communication skills or stopped reading the article quite quickly.

In my personal experience, the author's anecdote rings very true. At my first and last corporate job, I was handed a thick af HP laptop that could barely be used anywhere but in the cube, a hideous screen, 30 min build times, and a java stack that made testing/understanding the existing YUI (JS) codebase a brutal activity. It took almost my entire first 6 month contract to just get minimally productive, and that's without accounting for meeting interruptions. Another frontend fella was hired on shortly after me, and we worked together to test and get productive with this codebase which was great, until a month later the manager who popped his head in every so often to check that things were running to his measure, decided to shake things up and dismantle all the teams, re-positioning them on different projects for no apparent reason. My colleague and I were split up, me on the new project that he had been prepping for through requirements gathering and UX stuff. Starting from square one, on a team whose members had barely met, in a different part of the codebase that I'd never touched, and with a 2 month arbitrary deadline, all while everyone was moving from SVN to git, and the feedback loop on a frontend change (locally) being 5 - 10 minutes. Shocker, the project failed, I was fired, and much like the author, I wanted to get the fuck out of the industry.

Edit: I think it's important to note sometimes the nature of what you're working on or the company you're doing it for can be extremely constrained. That in and of itself isn't unsurmountable. But when the expectations, compensation, budget, and measure of output aren't balanced, or if the constraint is poor management that don't understand or care about the people they're managing, then it's just a tire fire.

[nerdponx]

Is this a communication issue?

When you realized the codebase was a mess and that it would take you forever to reach productivity, did you reach out to the manager and explain the situation? Did you push back on splitting up the teams, and explain why splitting the teams would be a bad idea? Etc.

Unless a manager is truly incompetent, in my experience they usually listen to technical people when they speak up on these kinds of topics.

[pavel_lishin]

Competence is a spectrum. I've worked with managers who would listen, and nod along to problems I was pointing out, and after the meeting nothing would change.

[craigzucchini]

It's very much a communication issue, but also an incompetance political game playing issue. To answer your question, I put a ton of energy into doing exactly what you suggest, which most people didn't and don't. It ammounted to some changes eventually taking place after I left, according to my former team members, but the managerial nonsense never dissapeared; those managers involved were later promoted.