Dealing with FE Engineer that wants implementations done for him

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miianah@reddit

well you just joined the team, they just do things differently on their team. i dont think youre in a position (yet) to change how they work. if you don't like, bring it up after you've been there for a while or switch teams

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stuartseupaul@reddit

Honestly Id like that, I love backend and frontend state logic. I dont enjoy dealing with css

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Aleks_Zemz_1111@reddit

I run precision manufacturing machinery for a living now, but I spent years in the dev space. We have a guy on the factory floor right now who does exactly this. He spends his entire shift doing "donkey work"—labeling pallets that don't need labels and wandering around—just to avoid the actual heavy lifting on the frontline. Management never catches it because they are too busy and he looks busy.

Your FE engineer is doing the exact digital equivalent of fake work. He wants to paint the walls while forcing you to pour the concrete and wire the house.

You have to stop doing his 70%. If you keep doing the state management, you are masking his incompetence, and management will never see the system failure. Let his ticket stall in the 'In Progress' column. When the sprint fails, you won't have to bring it up to management—the system will bring it up for you.

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Either_Act3336@reddit

If you think that that is not going to change, if I were you I would define the API with OpenAPI spec and there are tools that can generate you a dummy backend from the specs

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Cosmicdev_058@reddit

Document it. Next time he asks, respond in writing on Slack or Jira so there is a paper trail. "Happy to help, but this is blocking my tickets. Can we sync with [manager] on how to split this?"

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severoon@reddit

I’m essentially doing all of my tickets and 70% of his

It's possible that you didn't quite describe the situation in the way you intended, in fact, I'm assuming that's the issue because, if you did, here's the translation of what you did write…

"Coworker insists I do my job and most of his job for him. What should I do?"

The answer is obviously, don't worry about his job, worry about yours. If he raises a concern, ask him to please record exactly what he needs from you in the ticket and reassign to you. Then when you get it, explain that, as far as you understand it, your part is to do a, b, c, and all of that is done, then reassign back. If he bounces it back to you again, that's when you loop your manager in and ask him to clarify responsibilities.

If your manager actually does agree that you should continue doing this work, tell him, oh, I wasn't aware of that, I thought this was front end work. In that case, I've been killing myself trying to help him out and get my own work done, but if this stuff is now on my plate, I have to reevaluate my timelines. Then double all your timelines so you have time to do all this extra work that got dumped on you. Also, make a big deal about how you actually are taking on a lot more responsibility now, and you expect that will be recognized at perf in the form of bonuses / promos / whatever. Or, if you don't want that extra responsibility, just say so and stick to your guns.

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TheAlmightyDope@reddit

What the fuck kind of entitlement is this in this kind of job market? Sorry no, you do what you are meant to do, it's not your responsibility to baby someone who takes the FE title and refuses to even do that, most Devs have to be full stack minimum these days, whilst managing projects themselves.

This is a management issue, if you don't want to rock the boat being new then ask management innocently what the expectations are due to what is happening, are FE meant to just do UX design? Let them realise they somehow hired a rock in a diamond mine.

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Tehowner@reddit

Stop doing his work for him. Dudes gonna have to fail a bit to learn to get it done.

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hiddenhare@reddit

100%. Look at this:

there is a front end developer that refuses to work on tickets

He straight up refuses to start without it

When a colleague is pretending to have authority he doesn’t have, “no” is a complete sentence.

Maybe I’m a bit of a dick, but the first time he made this request I would have provided a polite “no”, without any further debate, just to see what he would do next and how the organisation would respond to it. His main bargaining chip seems to be… threatening to stop doing his job entirely? I would want to know who’s enabling that.

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GhostPilotdev@reddit

Agreed, but make sure the manager is looped in first. If you just stop and the sprint blows up, you want it on record that you flagged the dependency issue beforehand. Otherwise you end up looking like the bottleneck instead of him.

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crowb1rd@reddit

lol what? sounds like an html dev not a frontend engineer

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Reddit_is_fascist69@reddit

Doesn't sound like a developer; sounds like maybe a ui/ux designer.

Stop doing his work. Your ticket should be pretty clear. If it doesn't say wire up front end state, DON'T write up front end state.

How could this possibly fall back on you?

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Prize_Response6300@reddit (OP)

Thanks for the response. I’m not worried about me getting in trouble or anything I’m just worrying about this souring our relationship at work since we will be in this project for at least a year

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tallgeeseR@reddit

I understand the worry you have, I went through similar dynamic before. You need to figure out one thing - is your team manager: - not aware of the situation? or - aware of what's going on but prefer not to do his/her job as a team manager?

If it's former, focus on EFFECTIVE communication.

If it's the latter, consider changing job or team. Managers with 2nd attitude might even try to gaslight you, you're poor team player, you should cover other member's job, you're the problem or troublemaker, etc.

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chikamakaleyley@reddit

ok yeah so since this is kinda long term, personally i think there's nothing wrong with leveling with him and trying to understand what the expectations are all around

because it sounds like you joined knowing whats going to be expected from you, and all the sudden this changes the scope of your work - for the entire year.

So, its not unreasonable to say something to your manager and say hey, my expectation was that i'd be doing ABC and we've scoped for that; but what i find myself doing is ABCDEF - somehow DEF was unaccounted for and we prob need another resource

And so now you've kinda identified the issue without really pointing fingers... but really there's only 3 of you and we kinda know where you want to point yours lol

but yeah the idea is you plan for a manageable amount of work day to day, but since expectations are skewed then you can't even get your own work done. The manager should be managing the devs, they just need someone to identify an issue that threatens the quality & timeliness of the deliverable

in the end, that's the part that they'll care enough about to take action on

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chikamakaleyley@reddit

cuz honestly i understand the advice to just 'stop doing his work' but in a team of 3 that is gonna set the project back immediately, especially if this dude can do absolutely nothing until his steak is cut into bit size squares

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Massless@reddit

“Best I can do is a swagger doc”

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Izkata@reddit

At first that's pretty much what I was thinking they wanted, with the "simple frontend", but then it kept going with "wired up with all the state management"...

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serial_crusher@reddit

you can even use Swagger UI to generate a page where they click a button to make the API calls!

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Bemteb@reddit

Came here to say that. Provide the endpoints, provide the docs, if you want to be nice maybe set up the testing environment with your backend and let them know IP and port to work with. Everything else isn't your problem.

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hyrumwhite@reddit

Just don’t do it. Wiring up stuff to an api with good state management is a major part of being an FE engineer.

You could probably get decent results having ai do the rest once that’s in place.

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farzad_meow@reddit

in the next planning be clear as what is your responsibility and stick to that. also talk to your manager and re confirm your responsibility and stay in line to that. then stick to your work and document everything.

if you are not getting paid for it then why are you doing it?

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mpanase@reddit

Don't do his job.

Tickets need to be well defined, and is he is not capable of doing his job it needs to be clear to management.

You doing his job now is only making it your job and making him look good, forever.

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throwaway_0x90@reddit

What were the responsibilities/expectations communicated to this person during the interview?

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travelinzac@reddit

It is exceedingly generous to call this person an engineer

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yxhuvud@reddit

There are some frontend developers that have specialized to do only looks and let OTHER frontend developers do the value plumbing. That is perfectly fine.

But that specialization can reasonably not exist in a team of three. The frontender needs to understand that the ultra specialized role doesn't exist.

Of course, if they persist in forcing you to do it, it gives you the power to also do the choices. So you can take opportunity and choose something that makes it as easy as possible for the backend by picking HTMX or Hotwire or something else.

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greensodacan@reddit

That is perfectly fine and not uncommon.

I don't think this is true anymore, but for the sake of discussion, here's an interesting article on it from CSS Tricks. That article was published in 2019, and things haven't moved a whole lot since. The same frameworks dominate, and CSS has only gotten easier to work with. Anecdotally, the two sides came back together a year or two later.

This is anecdotal, but I worry how a front-end dev who's that avoidant would influence company culture. I once worked with a team where the UI lead was doing exactly this, and the other developers were totally oblivious to the JS world. It meant they struggled with problems that have otherwise been automated away, like manual CSS scoping. It also meant that inexperienced developers would quickly overtake the UI lead in expertise, but not enough to be lead qualified themselves, which of course lead to a myriad of bad practices and avoidable mistakes.

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Villainous_Q@reddit

O

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sourbyte_@reddit

Person is a designer not an engineer.

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liquidpele@reddit

Ah yes, the ux designer... aka "apple did this so we have to scrap everything and do it too"

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maelstrom75@reddit

I'm a full-stack developer. I worked in a 99% PC-based company for a client who required we RDP to our development boxes. The UX guy was the 1% Mac user that didn't want to hassle with setting up his Mac to RDP to a windows VM so fully expected me to live-share while he did his work as I watched, as if that's all I had going on. They are a different breed.

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beaverusiv@reddit

I see you've met "error and loading states don't matter, and edge cases don't exist" too. Their Figma designs only take 3 weeks to finalise!

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JohnDillermand2@reddit

Yup and I've met this person a number of times.

When this starts happening, I start forcing him to schedule meetings with myself and at least one other of his FE peers. Those front end pieces now become THEIR responsibility. Let their own kick him into shape. Let him burn all his bridges.

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Oh_no_bros@reddit

This is ridiculous lol, imagine if a backend engineer told you he can't do anything if no one sets up a server for him with routes and everything already defined.

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fdeslandes@reddit

Well, I have seen a back-end dev try to make front-end devs do all the API crud endpoints for him because he was only doing "real backend" at the services level... People told him to go fuck himself.

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Left_Plate_5181@reddit

Write a milestone doc to layout the dev tasks and timelines, share with him (ask him to put timelines), your mgr and his mgr. Then he will do his work or his manager will help :) - ex staff engineer, now engineer manager

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bonnydoe@reddit

Tell management they didn't hire a FE engineer, they hired a styling person.

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laueos@reddit

What do they do all day? Is there some pressure for you to do their work?

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Salt_Palpitation_108@reddit

Sit down with your manager and walk through the facts:

* In the past month, my duties have been x% UI, y% backend. I have detailed that here..
* My job role has increased in scope.
* I would like to discuss defining my role better, increasing my compensation to match my new duties.

Nothing beyond that. Management will start paying attention when money or dates are brought up.

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Careful_Let509@reddit

I would just refuse to work on frontend. Why would a dedicated backend engineer ever touch the frontend? The guy is clearly a CSS monkey and not a frontend engineer and you guys are just enabling it.

Why on earth would you ever give in to his dumb requests?

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sleepyguy007@reddit

i was a backend developer maybe 12 years ago at a startup, and got a "CSS person" to help me as they made me also do front end. then i got forced to learn android and do my own UX. somehow i've been an android dev for 10 years.... at some point i want to go back to backend and i have no idea how

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Idea-Aggressive@reddit

I don’t understand how most people keep their jobs honestly. I can’t prove it but it’s almost like 50% to 70% in most places I worked. It’s absolutely insane to me! And managers are worse

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honestduane@reddit

Stop doing his work for him and let him fail on his own.

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CRoseCrizzle@reddit

Unless he was explictly hired to only do styling(which means he is more of a Designer than an Engineer), then he's clearly in the wrong. You've got to have a discussion with management about this. And then management has to have a discussion with him. It seems like there some significant dysfunction here for expectations to be this misaligned.

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Onedome@reddit

He needs to be reported.

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Ok_Slide4905@reddit

This is not an engineer.

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PsychologicalCell928@reddit

"sunshine is the best disinfectant"

Lots of ways to bring this to management's attention.

Weekly activity plan. Let him defend the prerequisites that he's putting into his plan.
Roles and Responsibilities document. Write down that he is responsible for look and feel as well as state management.
Make him use a tool to convey the state management requirements that can be simply translated into required back end code.
Make a training video - essentially recording what you are doing. Share the training video with management. Then make it a prerequisite for training.
Figure out which statistics matter to management and measure them. Let management see that you're doing all of the setup work and/or that your work is more essential. A report that shows something like 100 tickets closed: total hours 1000: Steve ( BE developer) 1500 lines of code, 450 commits, 50 new tests, 50 amended tests - time 780 hours; Bob ( FE developer ) 350 lines of code, 45 commits, 10 new tests, 3 amended tests - time 220 hours.
Produce monthly/quarterly reports on lines of code added to the repository; number of check-ins; ... figure out the metrics that matter the most to your company.
Develop a plan for releasing a release that is 80% his tickets. Call it a two week to three week sprint. Let it just so happen to coincide with your vacation.
Advocate for a reduction in key man risk. Suggest that for the next release he take over some additional tasks to 'reduce the impact if you are incapacitated'. This is a best practice for risk reduction. If there is someone responsibility for risk management plant the seed with them.

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techno_wizard_lizard@reddit

Uh.. just don’t do his job? Just ignore them and do your job. Let them be the one getting into trouble for not doing the job.

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MoreHuman_ThanHuman@reddit

make sure the tickets are divided up accordingly, one dev per ticket. if you're doing work, make sure you're getting credit for the scope of that work and tracking it.

use the LLM to generate the front end, attach screen shots to your own tickets, let them clean up slop

if they complain to your manager that they dont have work you should be able to present evidence that this person is incapable of doing most of the work

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robert323@reddit

Stop doing his work. Let him answer for why it isn’t done

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skidmark_zuckerberg@reddit

Yeah this doesn't sound like a FE engineer to me. More like a UI/UX designer than anything. In the modern era, FE engineers worry less about the 'aesthetics' and more about FE systems design. So actively avoiding even things like state management is a big red flag.

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BlackSpicedRum@reddit

If youre suddenly hiring in the future, im a front end dev looking for work. I would be expecting to speak to backend about end points, but i wouldn't be asking you to build a starter front end for me (???)

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Careful_Ad_9077@reddit

(devil's advocate)

I can see a smart FE doing that if:

Backend refuses to have him being part of the design meetings, so onw he is stuck with a series of API that don't translate well to user experience. So he can't wire a proper front end because the back end does not allow him to.

I can see a bad FE doing that if:
They have no ifdea what they are programming and their only skills are to crete a pretty loolkign FE.

The good thing is that the solution for both is similar, have him attend design meetings , if he is good, he will give you good feedback and will help you untangle the API so his FE works. if he is bad but not so bad, you can end up with some kind of documentation that he can use to get started with his FE, if he is really bad, you can have documentation that proves that he can't do his job , that so management can fire him and hire a new one.

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chikamakaleyley@reddit

oh man, i'm curious if this is an older FE dev? Just cuz, this was the way I approached FE development... 15+ yrs ago

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chikamakaleyley@reddit

n part of that guess is they wouldn't be so stern if this was a younger/less experienced FE dev

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Extra-Organization-6@reddit

stop wiring stuff up for him and let the tickets pile up under his name. right now management sees all work getting done so there is no problem to solve from their perspective. the only way this changes is if his tickets visibly stall and someone asks why, and when they do you have the receipts showing you have been doing your work plus most of his for months.

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superdietpepsi@reddit

Wtf lol

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birdparty44@reddit

If they’re his tasks, then at some point management will see that he’s not accomplishing his tasks.

So I’m not sure what the problem is.

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since we are only a team of three at the moment

You are a team of two at best. Bring it up with management.