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by mgkimsal 1935 days ago
Rant: I've worked with a few where a simple "not my job" is actually an improvement. I've had "not my job, you figure it out" when asking for assistance from others, which is weirdly worse.

"When I pass X in, I'm not getting anything back - no error, I can't see the logs. Can you assist?"

"Not my job - you figure it out. We can't be expected to know how everything works."

"Yes but... this is literally something your team wrote in the last 3 weeks to support the larger project we're all on, and I was told to make my code work with yours. Have you ever tested taking input? If so, what am I supposed to pass in to your system?"

"Not my job - we're not here to babysit you - go read the code."

Later... someone else...

"Why are you spending all the time trying to trace through this code? You just have to ask. You have to learn to talk to people."

I sent over screenshots of the previous 'conversation' and got nothing back.

Thankfully this doesn't happen very often, but I'd realized that this org had segmented some teams so poorly, and put such deadlines on, that the culture of half the teams was "do minimal work and throw it over to someone else". It was more confusing because I interacted between a few internal teams, and some teams literally did not believe other people behaved this way. Even with written evidence, the problem was always assumed to be "oh, you're just not asking the correct way".