The Metaclueless Developers: Inheriting Teams Unaware of Their Own Shortcomings

The Back Story

One time, as VP of Engineering, I inherited a motley team of metaclueless developers and testers.

The Flawed Assumptions

From day one with this new team, it became clear my assumptions were way off base. My attempts to understand the existing codebase, dependencies, coding and deployment processes were met with confusing non-explanations from the senior developers. Proposals for changes, reviews, or other improvements were immediately dismissed with a passive-aggresive demeanour as unnecessary red tape. There seemed to be this ingrained belief that “we’ve been doing just fine” simply because they hadn’t suffered many major outages yet.

Peeling Back the Layers

But as I started really digging in, the reality was more problematic than I initially realised. The codebase was a disorganised tangle of inconsistent patterns and anti-patterns. Automated testing and deployement was sporadic at best. The deployment process involved brittle, undocumented scripts that only a few developers halfway understood. Institutional knowledge was scattered among individual brain silos.

The Destructive Hubris

Rather than a receptive discussion when invited to discussion on making things better, I faced a brick wall of defensiveness and hubris. The team was convinced they knew best – such that any invitations went unadopted. Every mention of improvement was met with circular justifications about “how we’ve been doing it for years” or “we haven’t had any serious issues yet”.

The Path Forward

Looking back now, I see that the situation revealed some universal truths about software:

First, we all get blindspots and make flawed assumptions over time – no matter how experienced we think we are. Maintaining a beginner’s mindset of continual learning helps.

Second, defensiveness and “ingrained way” thinking are toxic team pathologies that noone can solve alone. An environment of open dialogue and reasoned self-critique must be continually fostered.

And finally, the most dangerous hubris of all is assuming you already have all the answers rather than a humble openness to involving everyone in uncovering the real issues at hand, and ways forward.