dp.cx blog

I've been working on a project for the last year. The goal was to migrate data from one system into another, with my team providing the data layer. We started as two developers and were ahead of schedule.

There's a decision that managers put off more than almost any other: letting go of someone who isn't working out. I've seen it at multiple companies - someone consistently produces bad work, creates extra work for the people around them, and stays employed anyway because nobody wants to make the call.

A friend told me about someone at their company who got caught using ChatGPT to answer client questions during a live meeting - copying the questions in, reading the responses back, right there in front of the client. They'd been in the role long enough that nobody had been checking their work too closely.

I was on a team that put junior developers into the on-call rotation earlier than we should have. The reasoning made sense on paper - they needed to learn the system, and the senior engineers were stretched thin.

A feature request came through on my team while I was pulled into another project. The ask was simple - expand notifications so everyone on a team got them, not just people who had directly interacted with the item.

A senior engineer on my team is leaving. Not leaving the company - just moving to another group internally. On paper, it's a lateral move that doesn't change much for the rest of us. In practice, it changes a lot.