Returning and finding everything done is equally suspicious. That's when you have to take a closer look and discover what spaghetti made it through peer review.
It's not so bad being the worst player on the team. Just means you have a lot of room for improvement as long as you're willing to learn. Honestly it's one of my favorite situations to find myself in. "Oh I suck. How can I get better?"
Ive heard of stories where people would have an imposed test coverage percentage requirement... and they would just have a single dummy method that printed "." to the console thousands of times. They then have a single test for that one method, and whenever their codebase grows to big, they add more lines to it so that the dummy method has enough lines to meet the test coverage requirement.
It just irritates the fuck out of me when people write an obvious swear word but either omit letters or "censor" them with eg. *, like that somehow makes it not swearing even though EVERYBODY KNOWS WHAT THAT FUCKING WORD IS.
Either don't swear if you think it's so bad, or just write the naughty words out instead of pretending "f*ck" isn't a bad evil naughty word because you hid one letter like a fucking mentally deficient child.
I once had to go on a longer medical leave, couple of months. In preparation, I documented everything - pages upon pages answering all questions in easily searchable formats. For more than a month, any questions I got were answered with links to specific sections in the documentation, so people would know where to find everything. I put the links everywhere, in total there were at least 200 links to various sections of the documentation throughout all our communication mediums, as well as all information repositories.
After I came back from leave, most of the things I was responsible for were turned off. When I asked why, the response was "we didn't find your documentation".
Generally when you go on holiday and do a detailed handover to another dev, you find the team spent the week fighting some crazy fire in prod or sudden shift in priorities from up the chain. Don’t think I’ve ever had them actually complete my work.
How you gonna take 3 weeks vacation when an iteration is 2?! And how you gonna expect any dev to do anything without a daily stand up???? You need to be more AGILE dude
To be fair, if there's two people in the team and one of them is a junior, I would've expected nothing to be done at all, especially if it's as long as three weeks
I think, I would've left the junior some language or design research, and some questions to ponder about in the meantime, if I were in this situation
The question is, was nothing done because they're incompetent or because they don't care about the job and were able to do nothing with a "good" excuse
I had that happen to me as a junior. The other seniors weren't even able to help, so in the end nothing was done. IIRC it was an old python app which the OG author explained the nonsense logic of, but not how to actually run it, or vice versa. Either who the whole project was fucked up
I have a similar story. I started a new job and inherited a ball of mud written in Python while the creator was out for a few weeks. When he got back, he was grumpy about my changes. I guess he preferred it with more bugs 🤷♂️
You kids today. In my day we used Visual Source Safe and would accidentally leave a critical file checked out when we went on vacation and nobody else could get anything done until we came back.
This is the result of so called tribal knowledge in software development. It's even worse when the senior citizen who understands everything retires, goes senile, or dies.
Maybe, part of your job is to not touch anything in a random day and observe what happens when something breaks. That way, you can document what's not being fixed so that your team is more prepared when you're actually not there.
Sometimes I am happy about the increase in AI assisted coding specifically so junior devs won't get as stuck without outside help. Very frustrating when they don't reach out when they struggle, but at least they can privately copypaste into ChatGPT and get ideas. But, still requires a fine toothed comb when you're doing the review to know if any toilet tier material sprayed out.