So lately I am caught in a war between the old boys and new kids on the block


Preface:

In january I transitioned from bug work/minor enhancements to building some of the architecture for our new client app (mostly JS work)

Previously I was on a team with one of the new kids (who is really big on software engineering and best practices) with a long tenured team lead who also fostered that kind of environment.


My new team (until the end of the year most likely) is the application architecture team, consisting of super long tenured folk and a few younger ones.



So things were going relatively smooth, but a bunch of the younger/more forward thinking devs got together and started a series of meetings to try and get us moving towards a better server-side architecture, as well as seeing what other kinds of improvements we can make (like using AMD modules, getting to ES6 on the client w/ babel, and UNIT TESTING!!)

Problem is, they originally invited some of the older architects, and one in particular was not happy with what they were doing AT ALL.


This guy basically solo constructed our entire current server and client side architecture (when we transitioned from a winforms desktop app to a single page web app). Every time you question something on either side, purely code or whatever, he takes it as a personal insult.


That guy is my current teams lead (in a sense), so as more of these meetings happen and he gets unhappy, I am caught between him venting to me, then later I talk to my old team/co-workers and they all vent about him...


It is a bit of a weird situation to be in.

But yeah, I personally think we have made some definite progress, but if the new guys can get the old ones to cave in, we might seriously make some strides towards a much better (more bug free!) application.


Anyways, there is my mini blog.

meanwhile, at my job, all the oracle developers do their coding in notepad and share their code via shared directory instead of using source control. the VP got on them for years and finally convinced them to use source control. they picked QVCS and commit code once a month or so after it goes to production.

that makes me feel a bit better about the unit testing thing

we don't unit test either. we don't even have a real QA. just a few functional testers who don't have a technical testing background and it shows. just yesterday we found a problem in an edge case. so after the dev made a change, two of our testers tried that exact scenario and declared it was fully tested. i asked if they tested the main case or the other edge cases to make sure they didn't break. "Why would we test that? We already know it works."

lmfao, damn.

Yeah, our QA team isn't huge, but they are good at finding the edge stuff.

We are actually looking to offshore some of the patch testing....I can only imagine how well that will go

the culture gap is strong when I talk to the indian devs @ my office

But they have been here long enough to have caught on to most of the lingo. Most of them, at least....