I was hired as a lead engineer to fix the performance issues the team is facing, but I quickly found out the reason the team is slow is because my boss gets in the way. He is the CPO and has all of the power in the world, all departments report to him. He also thinks he’s an engineer because he can throw together some crappy POCs. He word is the final say and he is opinionated.

So most measures I attempted have got shut down by the CPO. I mostly have tried to bring us up to speed with industry standard processes, but he always finds a reason to say no. It’s because he wants development to work a certain way, the way he envisions it should work, despite it causing performance problems. And he doesn’t like when his ideas are challenged. At the same time he claims big changes should be a team decision, but the team is only allowed to vote if his ego doesn’t get bruised in the process.

So the other day I was working with our sole backend developer, who is also our VP of engineering. He is a sensitive guy, but pretty strange. We hardly have any code that makes up our API, the majority of it is done in SQL. But we came up with a plan to build our or new project. I finished all of my work and outlined what remains in our project’s Slack channel. What I didn’t explicitly mention is that I rightfully so shifted some of the work to the backend. So now all remaining work is on his end.

And my nosey wanna be boss spoke up. Why are we doing this? Why that? It should be this and that way. I said: “It was the VP’s idea” and walked away. It wasn’t only his idea, we worked on it together, I just shifted some of the work to him without telling him. They are doing their dance now. VP of engineering vs CPO on the best way to code something…

But why?

I’m happy I did it. I tried defining a SDLC recently to fix a lot of our problems. We got a designer so we should be able to act more like a team and be more productive, but the CPO was not having it. “It’s not the way we do things here”. I know… that’s why I’m trying to change it. I replied to his concerns and essentially assured him the things he brought up wouldn’t be a problem… he didn’t respond. And then… project management and the VP of engineering replied.

This was strange because it was in a thread no one was subscribed to. I know the CPO got them to speak up. I know because he plays political games like that and there’s no reason they’d suddenly start replying to a thread they didn’t get notified on. No one gave any opinions of the proposal until that point.

So I know the VP acted like a little bitch and acted like the CPO’s lapdog. So guess what? I don’t feel bad that I fed you to the wolves and I’ll do it again. Grow a spine or get out of the way.