I have been coding for many years in big co. I got to work with a young guy who came from reputable college in CS as a peer. My management thinks he is A level player thus pretty much he is on free rein. But I am left behind with mass because I don't want to leave things in loose ends.
He asks for help for any kind of stuff and asking me to take a look at his compilation errors. His lack of team playership makes me frustrated and not so motivated because my work is not appreciated. How can I improve here? Is this common with smart guy?
I have talked to my boss but he doesn't seem interested on lecturing etc.
Sorry for grumbling.
It's hard to understand you fully because your writing is so unclear, eg 'But I am left behind with mass [...]' Realistically, interpersonal communication skills are just as important as programming skills. If this is how you communicate to your boss, no wonder he is ignoring you - your English is as bad as your young colleague's code. Sorry to be so blunt, but it's true. If you just wrote this in a hurry, then do yourself a favor and rewrite it to be clearer - and I will delete this criticism.<p>On to your main problem - your boss likes his new employee, from a combination of novelty and because it sounds good to say 'I have an Ivy League guy on my team.' This is very unfair to you but it's a common situation in human psychology. As you are at a Big company, you should have some way to talk to someone in human resources and explain your problem in general terms, to ask what the appropriate strategy is. Definitely get that advice before making a decision.<p>It seems to me that you have 3 basic options here: ask for a raise, ask for a transfer, or work-to-rule. Asking for a raise, you are basically saying 'hey, I am having to manage this guy in addition to my own job, it's a lot of extra work.' Ask for a transfer gets you out of the situation, and while it's disruptive for you it means the new guy becomes Someone Else's Problem. However that's a rather passive-aggressive strategy, which I don't think is a very good idea. Third option is to say 'of course I'm here to help you understand our in-house libraries and our codebase etc., but handling compiler output errors and so on are the sort of skill you have to build up for yourself.' If he still can't cope, bring him to your manager and say 'he (or we) need/s some more training with this compiler, Big Co should send him/us on a training course to improve his/our skills.'<p>I don't think you should blame your colleague too much for his lack of a team player mentality. Bear in mind that not only may he lack experience dealing with production code, he is probably also unfamiliar with professional and social 'rules' of the workplace. He has mostly been in college with peers of the same age and school year surrounded by supportive faculty and the ability to work on new projects rather than deal with legacy code. So he probably does not understand how much of your mental resources he is consuming. At worst he thinks you are biter and burnt out because you are not so obviously excited to be working at Big Co and you probably don't think it's cool to eat cold piazza and write code until 4am.
Your English seems less rushed than non-native.<p>The red flags that are going off for me are related to the possibility that what you're seeing is an Ivy League white male discounting you as a foreigner.<p>Management in large companies doesn't like complainers. Bringing a problem to management when you don't also have a good solution to offer risks you being labeled a complainer.<p>Going to HR should be a LAST RESORT. HR is not there to help you; it's there to keep management from getting sued.<p>You need to see if you can work with this guy or not. If he's going to continue to discount what you know while still depending on you, you may need to draw very clear boundaries between your work and his, making him responsible for his own compile errors.<p>It may just be that he's gotten off on the wrong foot. You may be able to teach him if his head isn't already full of his own importance, or if you are willing to take a secondary role to his "Ivy" leadership. If neither of these things look to be happening, I'd be looking for another job, not going to management with a complaint that effectively says, "This guy thinks he's better than me, but he isn't!" No management wants to have to deal with that kind of complaint, so will start making your life more difficult in small ways.<p>Your non-native English is going to cause people to underestimate your intelligence in many places in the U.S., however. May work better for you to find a job in a company with a strong international presence, which will be less likely to equate English fluency with intelligence.
Give him concrete actionable critique as close as possible to the time of his "offenses". He's new to professional coding and probably doesn't know what he's doing wrong. For instance, after you help him with a compilation error that you think he should have figured out on his own, recommend him the resource that you think he should have learned it from. Take the lead in training him and putting together technical documentation around common problems new members of your team might have. It's more productive to recognize this as a flaw in the system your team has created for on-boarding new hires.<p>Using name-calling like in the title of this post will not help.
You are the experienced one on the team, and he is the new guy. Make sure he understands the hearty, and take a few weeks to mentor him in how things should work. Teach him the culture that you want to have at work. The fact that he is having some trouble is a good point for starting this relationship, but isn't necessary. You should be able to fix this.
<i>"My management thinks he is A level player"</i>... and yet he's <i>"asking me to take a look at his compilation errors"</i>.<p>A-level players don't need help fixing compilation errors. In fact, A-level players rarely have compilation errors. Routinely writing code that doesn't compile (except for obvious typos) is the sign of someone who doesn't know the language they're using very well.
It turned out as a rant but I do recognize it as management experience that I want to learn from. I have worked as ops in the team and reached out my network to reduce frustration that blocks his productivity. I don't think this is my unique problem. If someone has fixed this issue successfully, would you like to share?