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Seriously guys, how do you deal when remotely collaborating with lets say not the most motivated and competent devs?

Our scrum team got formed about 6 months ago from leftover devs of other teams, choosing a couple competent devs at the core and other devs who were kinda gotten rid of by their old teams, and after 6 months of working together I can see why.

Situation is that we are 7 devs in our team and 4 of devs are not pulling their weight. They are seniors on paper, but in reality not really.

They rarely take something complex to work on and even if they do, they make sure they take as much time as possible. Two of them are contractors who I imagine decided to treat the job as a paycheck and nothing more. There is no initiative, no push to make things better and in general attitude is to do bare minimum: only what is being asked and then delaying the hell out of tasks.

Im not exaggareting: Im talking about every possible way of dragging out the tasks: delaying communication, sitting around for a few days while not asking for new tasks to work on if they are blocked, also avoiding standups. Working for days on very basic comments in their MR's. Getting "sick" for a couple days on deadline when things get tough, so that someone else would come in, refactor and save the day. Once or twice it could be a coincidence, but nowadays I can already guess ahead of time what kind of trick they will pull now.

Our project is an android app where we have to support few different tablets, so the most recent new trick that I witnessed is devs avoiding hardware delivers, sometimes for months. Idea seems to be if you dont ping your team that you dont have hardware, then you can avoid working on related tasks with that hardware.

Worst part is that they get away with it. Our teamlead is a senior dev who is first time teamlead, doesnt code anymore and doesnt want to rock the boat. He is the type of teamlead who sets arbitrary deadlines, makes it sound that they are urgent and takes a few days off in the middle of chaos just before deadline. Restrospectives don't help at all and if I try to bring up stuff directly to him he tells me to bring it up during retrospectives. We discuss issues, rant a bit ant then continue carying on like nothing happened and nothing changes.

So little by little in the past 6 months we came to this point where 2-3 devs are carrying the weight of the team and are in a constant crunch mode, while others are allowed to slack. Its becoming ridiculous.

Problem is that this is starting to affect our morale. Only way that is left to keep my sanity right now is to pull away sometimes and also slack. Then I come back at full capacity, give my best for a couple weeks until I have to go and fix some basic leftover task that has been purposefully dragged out for 2 months and left unfinished, then I just want to scream and I know that its time to disconnect again.

Comments
  • 1
    For comparison with where I work, there is mandatory stand up meetings everyday. Failing to attend that will result in paycheck cuts for the day. Consecutive 3 times will get you fired (if not informed).

    I don't understand how environments like this get created in the first place.
  • 0
    @Sid2006 well they inform teamlead with some lame excuse and they are good to go.
  • 2
    If you can't convince management to do something about it, the only thing left is to accept the fact and complain about it once in a while.
  • 0
    @oiledwheels Remote talent my ass. Remote work nowadays has become joining daily for a 15min standup, replying to messages and going afk for the rest of the day. Then at the end of sprint pushing some code changes and working on them on next sprint until you get assigned another task. Some of them dont even hide it anymore, they stay offline in slack throughout the day.

    Yesterday this other dev pushed a broken change because he didnt even bother to try compiling it on his machine. Didnt even know how to find the issue in pipeline logs, so we ended up sharing a patch to fix the issue and that dev disappeared for 2 days, couldnt even bother to push that patch to git so we ended doing it ourselves.
  • 2
    @oiledwheels yeah, I mean
    One the one side of the coin, I started remote and I've been a real credit to my team. I teach the new juniors, SM a project after only 2 years, and am fairly liked and respected amongst my seniors and bosses.

    But on the other side, the guy who was hired at the same time as me just had no clue what he was doing. Masters in cyber sec or something and beyond useless.

    Aside from his security knowledge being nothing more than script kiddie bullshit, he just literally couldn't code.

    Couldn't understand python or typescript syntax to the degree of "this is inside a code block and that's outside a code block", couldn't understand logic to the point of "if this then that, else the other" accounting for every case, etc.

    We held on to him for a year or so before he finally quit after receiving a candid word to the wise from our line manager.
  • 0
    Would it be any better if it wasn't remote though. I doubt it.
  • 0
    @electrineer fuckers would be get bored from doing nothing and would be forced to work or at the very least they would ask help in a timely manner
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