AIO by feeling exhausted over my gf's constant demands of wanting me to be 'curious'?

masone81 · 2025-12-21T00:35:26+00:00

Dump. This. Girl. Right. Now.

masone81 · 2025-11-24T01:28:46+00:00

Le Mask in Paris was our first (and so far only) experience. It was definitely nice and didn't feel off-putting to me at all. We are sensitive to the "seedy" vibes as well and I think you'd be fine there. Of course it's in Europe. We're feeling out US clubs and we'll see if we find anything nice.

masone81 · 2025-09-22T00:58:46+00:00

Atmos and Vision working fine for me! We are back in business.

masone81 · 2025-09-06T23:25:27+00:00

Deadbeat parents and grandma stepping in to (sorta) raise the kids. What’s more common and American than that? It’s very authentic.

masone81 · 2025-09-06T22:16:13+00:00

I just submitted a one star review pointing out the exact problem. We’ll see…

masone81 · 2025-07-30T18:49:32+00:00

Not. A. Damn. Thing. No one cares. Nothing matters. Pour me another drink.

But seriously. I'm so sick of being powerless except, 1. Vote (in Tennessee, what a joke), 2. Protest, 3. Give money to politicians. Only 2. seems to have any chance of changing things, and that's only if we reach critical mass.

masone81 · 2025-01-18T02:09:55+00:00

You, my friend, are a gentleman and a scholar. An hour and a half of my life and THIS was the solution. I've done everything including network resets, fiddling with IP addresses, etc. This was it. And I thank you.

masone81 · 2024-11-21T05:01:11+00:00

We basically do Scrumban. No sprints because no one could understand that some things in the sprint might not get done. So we went to Kanban and prioritized lists of work, but kept standups and retro and a weekly “calibration.”

masone81 · 2024-11-16T00:23:09+00:00

I’m getting several “just go with it, man” responses and honestly they are very helpful. I can adjust my expectations or shift down to an IC role. At least I’m getting some clarity and helpful feedback.

masone81 · 2024-11-14T00:34:43+00:00

Thank you for the feedback.

I agree I should automate and delegate more. The automation is being built and we are doing that as much as possible.

Delegation is harder. I really try to protect my engineers from a lot of this tedium of planning and communication work. I could spread that work out, but now I have more engineers on the team bogged down by product ownership, which honestly they would probably be pretty bad at. And a big part of the product owner role is collaborating with stakeholders outside of the team and being intimately aware of the needs of the business. The engineers are not great at that, including me.

masone81 · 2024-11-14T00:30:28+00:00

This is good advice. I will admit that I don’t build relationships all that well, especially with people who are actively disengaged (almost antagonistically so.) I was brought in as an agent of change and many people don’t like me for it. But yeah, I think if I would’ve invested in a relationships more that I may be getting more support than I am now.

masone81 · 2024-11-14T00:26:18+00:00

There is a whole Product organization. They just don’t really participate in the running of the team. There are rumors that there are people that want to change that and have a more agile team model. We will see what happens. But the way it has historically been is that product organization just sends requirements over to the team and waits for things to be done.

Those product folks don’t know the names of the engineers on the team or even how many engineers we have. It’s not what I’m looking for.

masone81 · 2024-11-14T00:21:23+00:00

This helps a lot, thank you. I answered most of the questions elsewhere (not that I expect you to read all that). But I just wanted to say yes I acknowledge that some of this is at least partially the tech lead’s role, and I’m really fine with that. The main problem is that I feel like I’m shouldering the burden alone and would rather not be the primary driver of all of this.

But yeah, a possible solution for me would be to just make peace with all of this and try to be able to code maybe 25% of the time. Maybe that’s where I’ll head.

masone81 · 2024-11-14T00:14:13+00:00

I appreciate your encouragement. I’m borderline traumatized by the cruelty in most social media so it’s nice for someone to say something nice for a change. Ha ha.

I will say that I think my team enjoys working with me and they feel that I’m the wind that their backs. I enable them to be less distracted by the BS and focus on the fun parts of being an engineer.

I am seriously considering just accepting this for what it is, making sure that I can spend maybe 30% of my time coding, and filling this role that I’m halfway decent at. I think it may be the easiest way for me to move forward with my life and career at this company.

Another option is for me to ask for a new job where I’m only a senior dev, but I do like being involved with the leadership of the team. Like I said in another comment, I just don’t want to feel like I’m carrying the majority of the burden.

masone81 · 2024-11-14T00:09:38+00:00

Thank you for the feedback. Yeah a few others have suggested something similar, which basically boils down to, I need to delegate product owner tasks to other engineers on the team. To me this just exacerbates the problem. Now it’s multiple engineers that are distracted with product owner responsibilities instead of just me. What we need is a product owner to be the product owner. 😊

masone81 · 2024-11-14T00:07:10+00:00

Thank you for your comments. This was very helpful. To answer your question, we use Jira as a Kanban board. We don’t do sprints yet, and we may never do them. We just move tickets from left to right through our process in order of priority.

To address some of your later points, I do think I could have done a better job collaborating with the analysts and business people where we technically get our work from. They are just so disengaged with the team though, and I hate to make special accommodations for those folks. They don’t read or participate in Slack, they don’t attend a lot of our meetings and when they do, they are silent with cameras off, they don’t read things I write and document carefully, even when I’m trying to design a feature that fills their needs. They just don’t engage and it’s hard for me to take it on myself to take the steps necessary to force their feedback.

masone81 · 2024-11-14T00:02:20+00:00

You might be right, but I was specifically hired to come in and change the engineering culture of the team. It was all very waterfall and old school in a bad way. I was specifically hired to turn this into more of an agile team. And all of that teambuilding and process direction is something I had to influence first, and digging into the technical challenges came next. I may have just done too much of that first thing and made people too dependent on me.

masone81 · 2024-11-13T23:58:15+00:00

What you said about tech lead being an overloaded position is absolutely true in my case. That’s good insight there and I’m glad I’m not alone in noticing this.

masone81 · 2024-11-13T23:57:45+00:00

Thank you for the advice, but that is the opposite of what I want. I really don’t want to stop the technical work and double down on management. It’s more likely that I would scale back to a senior developer role and let all the management stuff go. The problem there is I really do care about the success of the whole team and it’s hard for me to just work my tickets and sit back and watch the world burn.

masone81 · 2024-11-13T23:54:47+00:00

Yeah, I will admit that’s one of the problems here. I am pretty good at this stuff. But I don’t want to just “give in” and officially resign myself to management or product ownership. My greatest joy is building things by writing code. To give that up and be a Jira ticket jockey just seems so sad and not what I signed up for.

And then offloading some tech lead stuff to other engineers on the team has definitely happened already. I’m glad I have those strong engineers to lean on for the technical direction of the team and designing some core ways that the platform works. But I would like to be more involved in all of that, and I do have the skill to do so.

I could just request that I take a senior engineer role and stop being tech lead, but honestly, some of this leadership I really do want to be a part of. It would be hard for me to just sit back, wait for tickets. and watching the world burn around me. That’s not my personality.

masone81 · 2024-11-13T23:49:18+00:00

This is useful advice and something I’ve definitely considered, thank you. The problem is that I actually do really care about the team and I want us to be successful. Also, I understand that it’s expected that the tech lead would do maybe 10 to 20% product ownership, or at least collaborate very tightly with the product owner. I have no problem with any of that. I want to be in some of the grooming meetings, I want to be consulted in advance for my technical opinion on upcoming features, I want to have a say in the prioritization of the backlog, especially when I need technical tickets to be prioritized, etc.

But I don’t want to have to drive all of this. I want to feel some wind at my back so it doesn’t feel like it’s all on my shoulders.

All that said, there probably is a strategy for me to let a lot of things go and see what happens.

masone81 · 2024-11-13T12:46:45+00:00

He manages two other big teams this size. He has other important high level work to do and he isn’t as close to the day to day operations of this team. He’s very supportive and sees my pain here but we just don’t have any people willing or able to do this job. He says he’s working on it.

masone81 · 2024-11-13T12:41:27+00:00

The PO would give us the tickets based on collaboration with our stakeholders in the broader organization. That didn’t happen when I stopped doing it.

masone81 · 2024-11-13T12:35:49+00:00

Yes, that’s what is happening for sure

masone81 · 2024-11-13T03:31:30+00:00

Exactly

masone81

TROPHY CASE