Another Exhausting Workplace

I am a young woman in engineering. As a result, my opinion doesn’t carry much weight despite being the most experienced. Additionally, I am often blamed for my coworkers’ screw-ups as I am supposed to be mother-henning them with no actual authority.

Despite trying my best to explain backwards compatibility to a coworker several times, he still thinks he knows best. As a result, several functions a client was using become defunct, and their code breaks which, obviously, annoys them. After a bit of pulling teeth (and having [Client] back me up), I get my coworker to agree to put those functions back in so it is backwards compatible and we are not creating issues for them. 

It is also worth noting that my manager is just kind of a waste of space. She wastes hundreds, if not thousands, of dollars a week being argumentative and dooms-daying every little decision despite not knowing what the heck is going on. It isn’t a technical knowledge transfer issue. It just goes one ear and out the other in favor of acting like the sky is falling if she doesn’t step in.

Manager: “What version are we on? Is the version going to change?”

Me: “We are on version [number] and it will be changed once we fix [client-found bug].”

Manager: “And are there any changes we need to make? I know [Client] had an issue that needs to be resolved.”

Me: *Biting my tongue* “Well, we need to add back a few depreciated functions for [Client] so their code doesn’t break. [Coworker] suggested we put them all in one section to organize them better.”

Manager: “So, have we thought through how this will affect our clients? We don’t want to break their code.”

Me: *Gobsmacked* “You mean besides giving them back functionality that they were using and making them happy?”

At this point, I just let her rant herself silly about the pros and cons. At last, [Coworker] finally agreed to fix it and it was fixed within the hour, after a week of banging my head against that wall.

I am leaving in three weeks, so it will be interesting to see what happens down the line when I am not there to stop them from doing something too fatalistic or act as the scapegoat.