Hey Dev.to,
I need some serious career advice as I face total burnout.
I joined a web development team about 6 months ago hoping to learn all about working in a team.
Instead, I've become the senior developer by default for the entire team as almost no one on the team is familiar with the web framework we use.
My team members constantly submit work that I consider to be absolutely unacceptable. Illegible, buggy, incorrectly tested and just sloppy in general.
I take my coding style very seriously and write everything with legibility in mind. I constantly apply techniques to make my code easy to read and easy to work with. My test coverage is almost a perfect 100% where the standard is 80% and this is all easy to me.
However, this all seems to be completely alien to my teammates. Not only is their code illegible, it's misguided and convoluted. Full of unnecessary logic and "reinvent the wheel" type of problems. Most of them seem to refuse to use the framework and have built buggy versions of features that are already built into the framework.
I've tried to improve team knowledge of the framework by posting links to docs, articles, and videos on the team chat which I'm sure only one developer has bothered opening.
My manager constantly interrupts me to request that I "help out" other developers which basically ends up with me giving basic coding lessons to the other developers and basically doing everything other than typing for them.
Sometimes I feel that they know I have no choice but to help.
I'm seriously considering leaving the team either by requesting that I be reassigned or leaving the company entirely. I feel burned out everyday having to spend weeks reverse engineering terrible implementations to add basic features that should take hours to complete.
Have you faced a similar situation? How did you handle it?
Unfortunately it sounds like you've managed what you set out to do.. you've learned about working in a team. Sometimes you work with rockstars, sometimes you don't.
However, chances are that the other members of the team have other specialties or are scrambling to get code out the door with an unfamiliar framework. Try and keep in mind that they may feel just as burned out as you. It sucks, but I can definitely understand it. I've been in plenty of jobs where I don't have time to take lunch, nevermind read a bunch of links someone had sent to me.
Perhaps the problem is best addressed by not doing the work for them. Nobody is going to learn that way. Explain, provide a simple example and get back to your own work.
However, first thing you NEED to do is speaking to your supervisor about it.
My final thoughts here would be that if you have a team of 6 and only 1 knows how or can possibly grasp how to use the framework, maybe it isn't the right framework, or it isn't the right team.