0

I'm a developer in a software development company. I work here for about a year and a half.

Today, Sunday, is an important deployment of our product. They chose almost the latest version which wasn't tested that much (27 November). Perhaps, there were some crucial features whose delivery couldn't, in their view, be postponed.

About an hour ago, our lead posted in our work chat. He included some code snippet, tagged me, and complained about some error that, in his view, was caused by my changes. I haven't investigated it yet. The related task was indeed done by me some weeks ago. It was tested, accepted by the QA, and closed.

Friday, the lead wrote an email to the projects developers asking to be in touch in case something happens. However, I never agreed to work this weekend. It is neither part of my legal obligations as an employee, nor par for the course in our job as an informal practice (at least, not in our department).

I heard that overwork, working weekends is part of the American work culture. It is not, however, part of the European work culture. I reside in Russia that has yet to fully embrace European values, yet it is not really part of work culture here as well.

The job market is tough today, especially for a developer under 3-5 years of experience like me. I don't think it is realistic to expect a new job offer, especially this time of year. It would be a heavy blow, if I lose the job. That said, it is also important to maintain boundaries and adhere to professional standards.

How do I act in this situation in a professional manner?

UPD: It turned out there was invalid data in the DB. It was not a conclusion of mine — it was determined by an independent party that I had no influence over whatsoever (the head of another department responsible for that particular functionality). Graceful handling of that invalid data was never part of any task that I'm aware of. The task was tested on valid DB data.

Improve this question
4
  • 1
    Please add a country tag. Even inside Europe there are variation in work culture an acceptable expectations. Commented 10 hours ago
  • What exactly is your issue here? That they complained rudely (whatever you mean by that)? That they did so only very close to the deadline? Reading through your description, the critical part seem to be that someone choose to deploy a barely tested version on a Sunday – the rest are just natural consequences of that. Commented 4 hours ago
  • @MisterMiyagi I'm soliciting advice on proper response on my behalf Commented 3 hours ago
  • I added another update relating to the causes of the error in question Commented 16 mins ago

2 Answers 2

Reset to default
5

Obviously the risk of being sacked according to your response cannot necessarily be averted, and is something only you can judge.

Unless you have profoundly important plans for this particular weekend, then these things are often about some kind of principle of the matter, such as the need for rest, respect for plans, or the need to set boundaries on a manager whose only limit is what they can get away with.

It's hard to tell exactly what principle is at stake in your case here. You acknowledge such weekend availability is not a normal practice in your department (nor culturally), and you've been there 18 months (so enough time to indicate this demand for weekend work is very exceptional).

I think what's really happening here is that your lead is annoyed that a bug he considers your responsibility was not fixed, and both as an act of contrition and since it is now an emergency, expects you to fix it immediately.

If so, then I think your best course of action would be to join in the work and solve the problem, whilst either stating your annoyance (if the issues involved are mild and/or your fault is ambiguous), or (if it really raises a systematic issue) stating your desire to have a more thorough conversation about it later next week.

I think as well, the fact your lead mentioned the potential need for availability on Friday suggests there was some advance thought. If such availability is strictly necessary during future deployments, then you might want to open a conversation about the need for more notice and specific agreement, and compensation (at the very least, time off in lieu).

EDIT: I see the question was edited from referring to the bug being raised "a while ago" (i.e. some significant amount of days or weeks ago, where you could theoretically have fixed the bug in normal hours) to being raised "an hour ago"!

That is obviously a lot more egregious, but I think the advice still stands that (as a first-time occurrence in 18 months of employment) it is best to investigate the situation and help fix for now, and then talk about the matters of principle this raises later in the week.

Improve this answer
0

I think it's true that in general, European workplaces have stricter boundaries around the invasion of personal time from work life.

If this hasn't come up in the first 18 months of the job, it's entirely reasonable to politely ask how necessary this weekend work is, and what expectations are going forward. It's also reasonable to push back against those new demands, though I would advise joint problem-solving as a first resort. Eg, "with this mechanism, we can release without taking the shared database offline, so it can be done at the end of a normal work day". Is the release process slow and infrequent? Might you not just have observed it before?

It is also not uncommon to be on call to support releases, across the world in my experience. If you don't like being called in your personal time, go to extra effort to ensure your code is of high quality and deploys cleanly in other environments without error-prone steps.

Improve this answer
7
  • 1
    ""a while" (weeks?)" I updated the question Commented 4 hours ago
  • 3
    "without error-prone steps" - does this answer come from the perspective of a developer at all? or is this mainly from the perspective of a non techie / business management Commented 1 hour ago
  • 1
    I think devs struggling with demands of people that do not do the actual work (but have stakes in it) could benefit from answers that do not come from the "but i am paying you" mindset, instead a "these are your options" one. it isn't necessarily that answers on this topic should only stem from actual "code monkeys" that share the burden of having to keep a business running through hard work.however, it's more likely that devs will give useful instead of accusatory answers. an example of a useful answer is the one from Steve Commented 1 hour ago
  • An hour ago is a pretty different situation, thanks for updating @SergeyZolotarev Commented 46 mins ago
  • Infrequent releases with long QA cycles often go together with error-prone deployments with manual steps, where support teams and management demand on-call support. This is what I was gesturing towards @reign. Have been on both sides of that situation. Commented 43 mins ago

You must log in to answer this question.

Start asking to get answers

Find the answer to your question by asking.

Ask question

Explore related questions

See similar questions with these tags.