work team excluding me from doing anything meaningful

March 21, 2015 5:51 PM

I'm an intern at a software firm on a new team. My coworkers don't seem to want to let me take any responsibility whatsoever. I have seniority over all of them but no power to change the situation -- any tips for dealing? Talking to boss is out.

I recently moved teams and have a new boss. My team is small -- there are, besides me, two new full time recent graduates from the uni I attend and one other intern who is newer than I am. I'm the only woman on the team except for my boss. We have a tool we use to divy up tasks, we take new ones as time allows without supervision -- agile, kanban style. The two new hires are really good friends from school and have been finishing the tasks I have picked without telling me and in general excluding me from conversations, meetings, and work functions in general. They're condescending and passive aggressive about it. I think they're not willing to rely on an intern to do work that they can do better but they do let the other intern participate. My boss is out of the picture, she's unapproachable at best and doesn't care who does what as long as stuff gets done. I'm slow but I can code, except this situation is making me question my abilities and feel guilty that I'm not as productive as anyone else. I need tips for dealing with this before it flattens me. The only noticeable difference between me and them is gender, and I hate the idea of the thought that maybe it's because they don't work well with women.

posted by city_park to Human Relations (14 answers total)

Best answer: Oh God I feel you on this.

we take new ones as time allows without supervision
and
My boss ... doesn't care who does what as long as stuff gets done

I've been a professional programmer going on 16 years, and my boss is actually quite nice, but I have similar issues.

Letting people assign work to themselves is just an idiotic system. It remove all accountability, allows the boss to completely punt on any sort of management, and tends to turn teams into "Lord of the Flies" situations where those who are willing to be the rudest win. Every day I struggle to imagine how grown adults convince themselves this is a rational way to manage teams.

And yes, sexism is endemic in tech, so I wouldn't be surprised if that was part of it in your case.

Do you have a system like JIRA, where you assign the issue to yourself and mark "in progress?" Are they assigning issues away from you to themselves? If so, I would get a paper trail and try to tell the boss. That just shouldn't be something people do, ever. That's your evidence that they are flat-out violating the "system," silly as it is.

feel guilty that I'm not as productive as anyone else.
Please don't. They're the ones slowing down the team by doing things in a screwy way. And it's another shitty point of this kind of system that you never have any idea if you're doing well, like you would when you completed all the work assigned to you. Just try to hang in there and know it's not you- it's shitty people compounded by a shitty system.
posted by drjimmy11 at 6:06 PM on March 21, 2015 [10 favorites]

Can you say more about the experience and ages of your co-workers? The way you wrote the question, it sounds like its you and 3 other people all of whom are either still university or very recent graduates. And you have no manager / team lead other than the boss, who you say is out of the picture. Is that right? Also you say you are senior; but it sounds like some of them are full time employee graduates and you are still in university and an intern? Is everyone an intern?
posted by Nelson at 6:14 PM on March 21, 2015 [1 favorite]

Best answer: First, be clear that as an intern, you do not have "seniority" over full time hires, even if they're freshly minted out of school and newer than you at the company. Whatever approach you take, that needs not to be part of it, because you'll shoot yourself in the foot by trying to make that argument.

Since you say she's not interested in the interpersonal bits, I'd suggest approaching your manager from the perspective not that they're stealing your work or not letting you participate, but that they're wasting dev cycles by doing work that's already in progress. Unless there's not actually enough work to keep four people busy, she should care that people are wasting time, even if she doesn't care that you are specifically being shut out.

"Hey, boss, I've noticed that often after I assign tasks to myself someone else picks up the same tasks and starts working on them, as well. It means time is being wasted with two people working on the same problem, and I'm worried about check-in clashes in the code, as well. What can we do to make sure that we aren't duplicating effort?"

Don't get me wrong -- I'm not denying the very real likelihood that these guys are misogynist assholes who are shutting you out. I believe that probably is the problem. But you need to shape it for your boss in a way that she cares about. And wasted cycles is something she probably cares about.
posted by jacquilynne at 6:25 PM on March 21, 2015 [50 favorites]

I'm not going to say there isn't some sexism aspect at play here because to be honest, there probably is at least to some degree, but I'm not sure that's necessarily what's driving this. It's going to vary with every company but at a lot of places, interns aren't viewed very seriously. Based on how little I hear anyone talk about this, I'm not sure if it's even still true but at some point you weren't legally(?) allowed to give interns critical tasks that you might give a regular employee. This combined with the general newbieness of interns as well as the transitory nature of their employment results in a situation where you never give them anything important to work on and try to come up with as much busy work as possible. What it kind of sounds like to me is that you were assigned to a group without much busy work and no one was made responsible for making sure you have something reasonable to work on, so no one wants to do it. I don't know if that helps you frame the situation any or not, but I hope so!
posted by feloniousmonk at 7:02 PM on March 21, 2015 [4 favorites]

Being an intern tends to suck at most places - as in, you don't get to do anything. When I was an intern, I was bored out of my mind. I didn't even have menial work to do. My classmates who had the best internships generally had their own little project to do. It makes sense - nobody wants to get too reliant on somebody who is not going to be there permanently.

And I don't know what you mean about having "seniority" - full-timers rank above interns even if they've just started. I mean if you'd been working there for years and they just started I could understand, but internships are generally a couple months at most?
posted by pravit at 8:02 PM on March 21, 2015 [1 favorite]

If the other two are graduates and you're doing an internship, are you actually considered more senior? That doesn't make much sense to me.

A friend of mine is a senior dev and one of the grads on his team is learning pretty much everything on the job. Another senior dev was really getting in the way of the grad doing anything. So, my friend now assigns the grad with small tasks that allow him to work on something that is his alone. It gives him space to learn and work on something that the other senior dev is happy to let go of. Maybe a similar work-around could be useful for your situation?

I would sit down with the two grads that are taking over the tasks and say that you're there to work but you're unable to do so if tasks are not being assigned to you. Ask them to assign you smaller tasks to work on on your own while they work on different things. If that works out it will still kind of suck, but at least it will be clear what you're supposed to work on.
posted by kinddieserzeit at 8:07 PM on March 21, 2015 [1 favorite]

I hire and manage interns as part of my day job.

Frankly, the place you work at does not seem to offer a meaningful intern experience.

You're correct to not approach your 'boss'. At most businesses, when an intern complains to management, the intern tends to lose. You'll be viewed as screwing around with the livelihoods of people with real jobs. Yes, this sucks.

The only worthwhile advice I can give you is either

a) leave, or

b) find a "mentor": some permanent employee at the business who is willing to advise you, help you, maybe make a phone call or two for you.
posted by doctor tough love at 9:38 PM on March 21, 2015 [1 favorite]

Who comes up with backlog items and prioritizes them? Generally people in that position have a list of tasks that would be fun or cool but aren't important enough to make it into the active list - those can be good choices for intern projects and seem less likely to be poached.
posted by inkyz at 10:48 PM on March 21, 2015 [2 favorites]

> Frankly, the place you work at does not seem to offer a meaningful intern experience.

This is an understatement. Please don't let this experience discourage you from a software career. As a female software engineer who has managed interns, I'm kind of outraged -- someone should be supervising you and giving you skill-appropriate projects and feedback on your work, not ignoring you and leaving you to fend for yourself. Frankly, they ought to be mentoring the two new hires as well; your team sounds like chaos. I hope you're at least getting paid.

What were the dynamics like on your old team? Was there someone on that team, more senior than you, someone you got along with, who might know the company culture better and be able to give you on-the-ground advice and mentoring? Can you switch teams to one that has more senior (experienced, mature) technical people?
posted by cdefgfeadgagfe at 11:45 PM on March 21, 2015 [2 favorites]

As an intern, having been there longest doesn't give you seniority or authority. When all is said and done, you're unpaid help. I know this sucks but it's the nature of most internships.

This could just be a crappy work dynamic. Maybe you're not supposed to be assigning yourself work and nobody is telling you to stop. Instead, they're just taking it over and since you're friendly, nobody wants to be a bad guy and tell you, "City_park, you're not actually allowed to assign yourself these tasks." Do they assign the other intern work or do they allow them to take on new tasks independently?

You noted that you code slowly. It's entirely possible that they need the work done more quickly and they don't want you to do it and instead of actually talking to you and helping you learn, they're just taking you off the task because it's (short-term) easier to do it themselves than to train you effectively.

Your best bet is to sit with everyone on the team and have a discussion about how tasks are delegated and carried out. There may be sexism at play, it may be that you're overstepping, it may be that they need work done more quickly than you can do it.

In any case, it may be time for you to move on from this internship if they're not going to train you and find something else.
posted by kinetic at 6:29 AM on March 22, 2015

I have seniority over all of them...

To be brutally honest, if an intern on my team was espousing this bullshit, I'd probably unintentionally exclude them from projects too. Improve your attitude towards work, and you may see yourself being included more.
posted by schroedingersgirl at 7:01 AM on March 22, 2015 [6 favorites]

How do you have "seniority" if you're an intern? If this is your attitude, you're probably pissing off your team. Interns are there to pick off grunt work, not to make important decisions.
posted by deathpanels at 8:03 AM on March 22, 2015 [4 favorites]

Best answer: You are completely confusing the meaning of the term "seniority" here - is that intentional (because you feel you are worth more than the treatment you're getting and are grasping at some "proof" of this?), or do you really just not understand the concept?

In the work context, "seniority" refers to 1) "the fact of being higher in position or status than someone else" or 2) "a privileged position earned by reason of longer service or higher rank." You're excluding the first definition in favor of a small piece of the second. While you are correct that you have been working at the company longer than these 3 coworkers of yours, that means absolutely nothing here. You're ignoring the very important social reality that an intern who does not have a full-time, paid job is of much lower social status than every single full-time paid employee of that company, regardless of how long anyone has been employed there.

Sounds like the "one other [male] intern who is newer than" you is getting better work than you. While I don't minimize the very rampant, well-documented problem of workplace sexism in tech, this: "I'm slow but I can code... I'm not as productive as anyone else."

Does not agree with this: "The only noticeable difference between me and them is gender." THIS is the issue you should work on, by getting faster at coding and being more of a value-add to the team. This is NOT the time and place to argue your "But I have more seniority then all of them" case. It's a losing argument. Instead, work on getting some mad skills and demonstrating them.
posted by hush at 9:10 AM on March 22, 2015 [8 favorites]

.When all is said and done, you're unpaid help. I know this sucks but it's the nature of most internships

No programmer should be doing an unpaid internship. It is very common in the field to pay interns a full-time pro-rated salary for the few months they are there. An intern who is taking work from the common issue tracker but not being paid is working illegally. People who are unfamiliar with software jobs may attempt to talk from their own experience with interns trying to get into fashion or journalism or some other field where unpaid internships with horrific conditions are 'acceptable' and should be ignored in this context.
posted by the agents of KAOS at 10:36 AM on March 22, 2015 [6 favorites]