So, I work in a medium sized team and earlier in this year, our team helped another that was behind in some tasks that all of us need to complete together.
After this, that team always asks for help from our team for untested things from their side and the worst part is whenever something breaks on their side, it breaks for a lot of people (like us) too, and they break a lot of stuff, simply not testing anything, no unit tests, no integration tests, nothing, they just throw broken shit out of the door.
This happens even to the things we made at their place, something’s up with our code? They changed it. It doesn’t seem to matter if it’s adding 2 lines to a sql query, they added an extra comma and didn’t test, they changed the batch processing? Now the process returns a broken json with different fields than the Enum expects. Yeah, they changed the value of the field that was ALREADY working for no reason and didn’t test it.
I’m pissed off, told my coworker that it’s their problem now, but the problems always come and the boss call us to help. This is very frustrating for us and for other teams too, even today another boss was talking about them breaking things in another system that we and they interact.
Their boss seemed to just want to give work for them, even with these problems coming back. The outsourced people work better than them, but you know, they are outsourced and the not so competent team is in house, so they can do nothing.
What can I do? Just saying no when the problems come? Talking to their boss?
That’s a job for THE MIDDLE MANAGER!! (imagine a crappy super hero)
No, seriously, do not step over your boss to talk to theirs. That’s like, the job your boss has, and they might get pissed at you, and, depending on pettiness level, make your life worse. Talk to your boss, explain how and why that’s a problem. Make it clear you expect them to solve it.
If and only if they say they can’t do anything, you may consider talking to your boss’ boss. But not the other team’s boss. Before doing that, I’d have hard financial evidence, like the other commenter suggested. Log your hours in their time buckets for at least a month, get others to join you in doing the same, get a report with total amount spent. Then you turn again to your boss and maybe include boss².
No, don’t talk to their boss. They aren’t on your side. Talk to your boss. Any good boss will be an advocate for their team. I’ve often taken things up the ladder saying, “I know others feel the same way, but I’m not going to say names because I don’t want to out them if they aren’t comfortable saying it themselves.”
Anyway, being diplomatic is pretty important if you don’t want to be labeled a squeaky wheel.
Discuss with your team management how to handle this.
- Guard and test against breakage of the interfacing (it’s an investment, but necessary without other solutions)
- Define requirements and actions you can stand by and reject for and and revert by
- Whether they want to tackle it on their management level (talking to the other teams or up etc); agree on timelines, requirements, milestones, and failure conditions regarding this
For this discussion collecting the impacts, in terms of labor cost, labor motivation, short and long term cost, repeated helping-out cost to your teams tasks, etc can underline significance.
