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How to convince my engineering org to participate in large-scale migration?

Senior Software Engineer at Series C Startup profile pic
Senior Software Engineer at Series C Startup

Context:

(1) My team owns a service for which we're rolling out a new version with a big revamp of all the public interfaces and a ton of breaking changes.

(2) This is a legacy system that is being refactored to resolve some severe issues that its consumer systems have been complaining about for a long time.

(3) This service has many consumers in our org across multiple teams that depend on it for a lot of critical functionality.

(4) We need to migrate all consumers to the new service. My team cannot parallely support both the versions and the legacy system has to be deprecated before the new service deployment.

Challenges:

(1) Originally, the plan was for my team to roll out the new service and migrate all of the consumers to the new service as well.

(2) Now, we've had a huge scope expansion in the refactoring itself due to which the project timeline has extended massively.

(3) My team feels that working on such a long timeline project is risky and prone to further scope expansion if new consumers start using the old legacy system in the meanwhile.

(4) Another challenge with this is that my team has no context or understanding of all the consumer systems.

Questions:

(1) What approach can I use to now change the plan and convince the managers/tech leads of the consumer teams to own the migration of their consumers code to the new service?

(2) In general, what approach would be ideal for such a large-scale migration - Centralized migration by the service provider team vs distributed migration by all the respective consumer teams?

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Posted 2 years ago
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1 Comment

How to manage a relatively junior engineer who is kind of bossy and dismissive?

Senior Software Engineer at Taro Community profile pic
Senior Software Engineer at Taro Community

While leading a project/initiative, the engineer is not inclined listen to the entire context and just cares about what they need to implement, yet gives out a vibe that they are the highest contributor to the project and dismisses most things I say. Seems like they are perpetually in a rush and keep cutting me off. They are good at grasping and implementing if a very clear direction is given, although it feels like spoon feeding at times. They are very quick to re-assign the task back to me by saying "Can you do xyz?", when they were supposed to do "abc", which needs "xyz" to be figured out. As soon as they can't figure out anything very easily, they assign part task back over text! They are fairly less independent in implementing the task. Although, I am very confident that they do have the ability to be independent, they don't flex those muscles.

I don't think anyone else on the team has problem particularly, although I heard light-hearted conversations where other teammates feel like they overload them with several code reviews at once and follows up too closely by pinging them constantly if there is something they need from others. Overall, the team is very supportive and gives shout-out to them when they implement the task successfully even if that means they were being given very specific direction by for the task completion.

I am hesitant to bring up with manager, as it may be reflect that I am lacking capability to handle the situation and manager may kind of laugh it off. It's been a bit frustrating to be honest, but I want to regulate my feelings and handle this in a controlled manner.

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Posted 9 months ago
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2 Comments