Episode 171: Unwilling mentorship and tortoise vs hare DevOps

Published: Aug. 19, 2019, 7 p.m.

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In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions:

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    Hey guys, love the show. I\\u2019m starting to realize that our QA engineer lacks some skills required to do their job effectively. It\\u2019s now starting to affect my work and I can only see it getting worse. I\\u2019ve tried approaching them about their work and given them some pointers on how they can improve. I\\u2019ve done several pair programming sessions as well. They are a bit stubborn though and I don\\u2019t think they will change until things get a lot worse when they realize their mistakes first hand. We are a small team and I\\u2019m the only other member of the team with automated testing experience.

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    Should I be having a discussion with my manager about this? The company is pushing for more automated testing and if the problems are addressed now it would be easier going forward. I\\u2019m hesitant to say anything in case I open up a can of hate worms though or get them fired as they are a nice person.

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    P.S. I\\u2019ve only been here a couple of months so moving jobs won\\u2019t be an answer for me on this one ;D

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    Greetings from Germany,

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    I am coming from the Infrastructure side of things, and we are a team of engineers with 0-3 years of experience getting into DevOps (tm). Often we encounter new tech-stacks that involve a lot of concepts to learn (like AWS, Elastic, CI/CD, System Provisioning). The way we approach these topics leads to some conflicts. Most of my colleagues like to jump into the water and set up production systems based on a mix of trial & error and copy pasting examples form StackOverflow. I on the other hand try to do things a bit slower by learning the basic concepts and applying them together with examples to get a deeper understanding of the system.

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    My approach is slower but often leads to more robust and thought out systems. However it leads to my boss and my colleagues often eyerolling me for seemingly \\u201coverthinking\\u201d it. But I also see the appeal of the other approach, since it allows for fast results and pleases the stakeholders. But I see a lot of issues and often time consuming restructuring projects coming from that.

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    Should I just give in and swim with the stream while i suppress my inner nerd cracking down on things?

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    Loving your Podcast btw and recommend it to all my fellow tech nerds. :)

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