Episode 331: Prickly ticket and title downgrade

Nov 21, 2022

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ADVICE

Learn Infrastructure Team's Ticket Style

Study this infrastructure team's previously closed successful tickets to understand what they accept and prioritize.
Mimic the style and information in those tickets to improve your chances of getting help from the team.

INSIGHT

Infrastructure Teams' Defensive Posture

Infrastructure teams often develop defensive postures due to overwhelming requests and poor quality reports.
They may reject tickets by default and only seriously engage when tickets are reopened with more evidence.

ADVICE

Request Manager Guidance Constructively

Discuss ticket submission experience with your manager or a trusted teammate, focusing on how to request help effectively.
Avoid complaining about rudeness; focus on improving communication and ticket quality to work better with the team.

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In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions:

Listener ninjamonkey says,

I am a new grad who is half a year into the role now at a very large company. Recently, a senior engineer on my team asked me to create a ticket for an infra team for a problem with a service. I provided logs and steps to reproduce the issue and did a health check before submitting.

Right after, the manager of the team put me into a group chat with their team, asked why I created the ticket and told me to start doing my job and they can’t debug for me.

From these interactions and comments on the ticket, it feels the infra team will likely not work on the tickets I report or de-prioritize them. This has left me discouraged and hesitant.

I will have to do lots of this kind of infrastructure work in the future. Additionally, one of the goals my manager set for me is to work with more external teams for the upcoming year.

What do I do here? Do I tell my manager about these interactions? Do I tell my team lead, staff/seniors to swap out for different kind of story?
I work for a small startup. I was the first employee other than the 2 founders.

Being the first developer hired, naturally means I have the most knowledge about our application. I also have good organisational skills, which has led to me becoming and being referred to as the “Lead Developer”.

I have recruited 2 of the 3 new developers, and have trained both of them and got them up to speed.

At first I was pleased with the progression and was keen to grow into the position, and told the founders so.

Since then, I have changed my mind, I don’t want to be the lead - due to the following:
- The communication is absolutely pitiful. Any questions we ask of the founders we get about a 30% reply rate no matter the form of communication.
- We get poorly defined tasks and requirements
- The CTO will just blast through some of our features over the weekend and say here I fixed it for you
I don’t want to quit my job (just yet… its a comin though).

I have actually discussed the above points with them, but I know these 2 founders will never change their ways.

How do I tell them I just want to go back to being an Individual Contributor like my Employment contract states?